How to Prevent Drowsy Driving in North Carolina – Once and for All
Whether you recently got into an auto accident in North Carolina, or you’re just searching for smarter safety tips to protect yourself, your family, and other people on the road, you might benefit from considering the hazards of drowsy driving. In a recent blog post, we talked about the dangers of something called microsleeping – where you fall asleep for a few seconds while appearing to be “awake.” Microsleeping can have devastating consequences, in that it slows your reaction time. Also, most people who micro sleep have no idea they are doing it!
Microsleeping is just one of the myriad hazards of driving while not rested. Some researchers out in Australia, for instance, tested drivers who had stayed up for a full 24 hours. They found that these tired drivers exhibited a level of impairment that was actually greater than the impairment the typical Charlotte DUI driver exhibits. Scary stuff, indeed.
So what can we do about drowsy driving, on a practical level?
The pat answer is “get more sleep.” This is obvious enough. And it’s true. If you notice that you are flagging behind the wheel, take that as a serious sign to pull over, rest, and perhaps stay the night. Caffeinating yourself can temporarily work, but not always. And caffeine often takes some time to “work,” due to the biochemistry of how caffeine impacts the brain’s dopamine centers.
Unfortunately, most tips for drowsy driving offer little more than short-term fixes.
The advice out there offers little more than “band-aid” solutions to problems that have already occurred. Although these tips can be useful in a pinch, they do not “get at” the deeper potential structural problems with your driving habits and behaviors.
For instance, if you’re only getting four or five hours of sleep a night because of a crazy work schedule, then you’re guaranteed to confront the drowsy driving dilemma again and again, until you fix the larger schedule issues with your life.
Recognizing this reality provides new opportunities and new challenges. Now, the question of how to prevent drowsy driving becomes a broader question: how should you reengineer your life, so that you are generally less fatigued, more alert, and more capable of recognizing when you might potentially have an issue?
It’s obviously harder to give general solutions to this integrated kind of problem!
While you can tell basically any drowsy driver to “take a nap by the side of the road”; what do you tell an over-stressed mom of three who needs to work two jobs and drive 45 minutes from one to the other job? There might be good advice for her. But that advice is not necessarily generalizable. And therein lies a challenge. People need highly specific guidance beyond the traditional band-aid like solutions to drowsy driving.
Given these issues — and the stakes for your life and well being — you might find it useful to spend time thinking about your driving habits, journaling about them, and brainstorming ways to prevent yourself from getting into vulnerable situations in the future.
If you have been involved in an accident in Charlotte or elsewhere in North Carolina, the team here at DeMayo Law can give you a free and confidential evaluation of your case.
