Here's a trick I've been using: if you are driving and start feeling tired, hold your breath. Your brain will go into a bit of a panic mode: "Where's all the O2?!", and you will feel more awake for a short period of time. Do note, that this is a great trick to get you to the rest area 3 miles down the road, not a good way to drive all night long.
If you're alone in the car, try screaming. It creates an adrenaline rush.
But I MUST add that none of these tricks will last for more than a couple of minutes, and after you do them a couple of times, they stop working. Sleepy drivers start "microsleeping", which means they fall asleep for a second or so then wake up without being aware that they did it. The microsleeps gradually get longer until you start noticing---or you die or kill someone else.
Don't take sleepiness on the road lightly. You can use the screaming to get yourself safely to a parking place. If you are this sleepy, pull into a busy parking lot and go right to sleep for 15 minutes (set an alarm). You're unlikely to be bothered by anyone in the first 15 minutes in a very busy, public location. They'll assume you're waiting for someone.
The trick probably works, but the body doesn't actually have a "low-O2" detector, but rather a "high-CO2" detector. Most of the time, they are equivalent; however, if you have e.g. CO poisoning (thus, no CO2 buildup), you don't feel suffocating even though you're out of oxygen.
Yawning is designed to wake you up. Yawn's apparently provide a boost of O2. We yawn when we're tired because we're trying to stay awake/alert and yawning enables that; if someone yawns when you're talking then they're actually trying to concentrate - that's a good thing.
I'm pretty good at fighting the panic response when holding my breath - lots of underwater swimming bravado as a child - at what point do you breath?!? Leave it too long and you'll just pass out at the wheel. I'd imagine for me this would be too distracting and make me more likely to crash.
I imagine, just like everything else, it doesn't work the same way for everyone. I have tried several techniques of this personally, including filling my lungs and holding my breath, and exhaling completely and holding my breath. The latter works better for me. I have no special training but I can hold my breath for about a minute if my lungs are full. The problem there seems to be that it gets me even sleepier. However, if I exhale and hold my breath it only takes about 10-20 seconds and the response is very immediate and sharp.
I should also note that I don't tend to pass out. Last time I came close to passing out, I was in a state where most people would have (blood pressure at 70/40). Perhaps this trick is not for you if you pass out easily.
(Yes, it's humor, but BAHfest is great at satirizing wild ass guesses that have become mistaken for legitimate hypotheses when we really don't have the evidence to say we know.)
When I mentioned it I knew I really should have looked for a citation first, it's something I heard on BBC Radio 4 (!), which is usually a good source for science/mathematics based information ... but you got me. The article I heard was primarily on empathetic aspects of yawning.
Initially I was going to write "an O2 boost to the brain" but thinking about it I couldn't readily create a mechanism for that to happen - I'm terrible at human biology mind you - and so I reduced the claim in case I'd miss heard. Presumably to boost oxygen to the brain you'd need to increase blood flow (vasodilation or heart-rate) or increase oxygenation of the blood.
Taking a very quick look at scholar.google.com there are citations supporting humans yawning when they have low blood oxygen; there's also papers saying that hypoxic patients increase blood oxygen levels through deep breathing. A yawn is like a single deep breath ... so perhaps?? But I'm not in a position to look further.
I have an additional hypothesis for why holding your breath might give you more cognitive energy for a period of time. It could be that the stomach compression and neck muscle tension that often accompanies holding your breath is raising the blood pressure in the head area and thereby increasing blood perfusion.
Neat, I hadn't heard of that one. Both of the tricks for staying awake and alert while driving that I have used involve discomfort:
- If it's cold outside, roll down your window.
- Find a radio station playing music you dislike and crank it up.
my pet hypothesis is that caffeine catalyzes energy consumption, at the expense of efficiency. that is to say, drinking a cup of coffee in the morning makes me a good worker for 1 hour, then i pay the price over the next 5-7. in contrast, no caffeine means a slower start, but more total "energy" towards work gets produced. basically, i dont think you can top natural energy regulation.
Where do you live? Because the climate would put a kibosh on that in a lot of places pretty quick. (Even if you're personally fine with being outside in -20°F (244 K) weather, there are rather serious mechanical issues with biking through deep snow and on glazed ice with a thin layer of loose snow on top.)
There are very few highly populated places where climate would reduce your ability to cycle most days of the year. I'm from Whistler, Canada, I spent a few winters commuting by bike every day, and it's in the Coastal Rainforest, so lots of rain too.
Sure, if you live in Moscow/Anchorage/Montreal/Stockholm/etc, it's miserable for a few months, but the rest of the time, you can cycle.
Plus, cycling in the cold wakes you up even faster than cycling in the heat.
There's not that many places where you end up biking through deep snow, on ice, in -20F for a long part of the season, right? Normally its one of the other (really cold, or ice) - if you have long periods of -20F then you have packed snow on roads, not ice, at least we do back home, and packed snow is fine to go on.
I'm from Sweden, and when I lived in Gothenburg I had no issues biking in -10 - -20C or so (which is what it maxes out at in that area, and even then only for a few weeks at most).
Snow is fine to go on - the worst is like 0C when its been melting and freezing so you get slippery ice, but even then you do fine most of the time as at least the car parts of the roads tend to be maintained with gravel. Assuming you live somewhere that regularly has cold weather your roads are most likely decently graveled too.
Not really, living in Minneapolis I've had several (perhaps crazy) friends who biked to work every day year round excepting maybe one or two of the worst days.
Yep, I live in St Paul. Know many possibly crazy bikers that bike to Minneapolis even in heavy snow.
They have the crazy huge tires as well to go over snow/ice. Each one said its not a huge deal to bike in -20ish weather with snow/ice. Just means you travel slower was their statement.
I'm curious about the logistics behind this. Do you have an issues carrying items to work? Spare clothes, laptop, lunch, etc. Also, do you shower and change once you get to work?
I recently took the plunge and started biking to work semi-regularly as well. Here's a few points that got me going.
Sweat. If you have a shower at work then great. If not there's no reason to go full tilt on the way to work. Relax, go at a reasonable pace to avoid working up a major sweat. We have a shower at the office, but I rarely use it because it's not too hectic of a ride.
Store stuff at work. Drive into work on a Monday and bring clothes and stuff with you and store in a locker or somewhere at work. Then bike the rest of the days and drive home later in the week.
If you can leave your laptop at work the odd day.. you'll enjoy life at home that much more :)
I can easily pack a change of "work clothes" (used to include dress shoes), toiletries, camp towel and lunch in a small backpack or largish messenger bag. Having a shower available is strongly recommended, however. Built-in in hydration for the backpack isn't a bad idea either.
I've gotten lazy and haven't biked in in awhile, but I used to do it every day by heading into work about 30-45 minutes earlier than I would drive, swapping my shower immediately after I got up for showering at work, and compensating for a slightly longer commute. If you compare the amount of time you'd spend driving to a gym, working out, then driving somewhere else, it's a no-brainer, bike commuting kills two birds with one stone and saves you gas money. Or you can try what I did for a while and get up even earlier to bike to the gym, workout, shower, then bike to work, using the cycling as warmup and cool down for the gym workout.
A backpack solves all of those issues. None of that is necessarily very large.
As for the shower, some work places have showers. Depending on how much you work out and what the climate is like you may or may not be a heavy sweater after a ride to work. People who work out often tend to sweat more because their bodies adapt to their routines and start to sweat at the slightest hint of physical exercise. People who don't work out extensively often tend to be more reserved when it comes to sweating. You are going to work, not a date. So it may not be an issue at all.
I can't wait to get a bike next season and start biking to work.
yes! i just have a milk-crate, but it makes all the difference.
yes also to OP on the "bicycling to work wakes me up super well" - i did in a northern US city for 6 years, and the icy/cold months when i had to rely on transit instead were remarkably more challenging, especially the mornings, even if i kept up other indoor exercise.
All bodies are different; I read the GP and thought, "yeah, no, I'm in fairly decent shape, and I have to work really hard for a good long while to break a sweat". I never have to use chalk while rock climbing, for instance. I think my body's adaptation at this point is that light physical exertion isn't even a warmup for me any more, and I've burned quite a bit of "insulation" off (biking in to work does make the fridge cold labs feel warmer). That being said, having a shower is another good way to wake myself up, sweaty or not.
WRT Chalk & climbing, propensity to sweaty hands differs from person to person, but for both myself and my climbing partner, need for chalk is almost all mental. When I've got a cool head and smooth moves, my hands are dry as a bone. When I'm freaking out on lead, my hands get progressively more slippery...
FWIW chalk improves the friction coefficient of your hands, and seems to reduce friction damage to the skin, so I try to use it anyway.
When I have plans to bike to work, I usually stage extra sets of work clothes/shoes at my office the day before(when I take mass transit), so I can carry a light load on my bike commute.
Luckily for me, my office provides showers and lockers, a laptop I can keep at home, and free lunch on the premises, so load is not much of an issue for me.
If you do need to carry some stuff, you can always get a pannier(a bag mounted to the side of your rear wheel), which is more comfortable than a bookbag filled with stuff.
I've been off caffeine for 2+ years now, I always feel like I've been poisoned when I use it, jittery and completely unable to concentrate. Also interesting that they didn't mention any of the longer acting transporter blockers like methylphenidate or other "performance enhancing" drugs that have been widely reported to improve attention (the button pressing test is actually diagnostic for the action of these drugs).
I've picked up and dropped a moderately sized caffeine habit at various points in my life. The biggest effect on me of being off caffeine is a reduction of my tolerance for caffeine when I have some next (smaller amount has bigger effect) and clearing out the addiction (can go days without caffeine without headache). I don't see appreciable changes in my quality of sleep (exercise does that!) or my ability to focus.
I have every expectation this differs dramatically person to person, and I encourage anyone with any sort of habit to examine it, but what you say does not necessarily apply to everyone.
I have chronic and severe sleep issues - they're probably psychological but I've subscribed to a theory of being "non-24" for some time.
I've sworn off caffeine twice in an effort to regulate my sleep better and neither time has it helped me in getting to sleep. What it does do is in the "morning" [ie when I wake] make me more alert, I'm not in caffeine withdrawal, I feel better.
If you're going to try it then my advice is to ensure you still drink enough: substitute caffeine drinks with water for example.
For me going cold-turkey it takes about 1 week for the severely painful headaches to stop and for me to be able to think clearly again.
So far as I can determine caffeine has potential long term positive effects, doesn't have lasting negative effects. I slip back in to it because it's in the house and at times I have to use something to wake me up when I'm sleep deprived. It's pathological.
I find I quickly become tolerant to the awakening and focusing effects of caffeine but not to the anxiety-inducing effects leading to increasingly anxious thought patterns.
Every time I start in on caffeine again because of a crunch I end up regretting it later.
My dad's trick for beating jet lag is going swimming at the hotel where he lands. I have a hunch there's something about being in standing height or deeper water that triggers your body to stay awake (since you would otherwise drown)
Interesting, I like to go swimming midday or evening and it helps me "reboot" as well. After about 30 minutes of medium to high intensity breaststroke I often feel better than when I got out of bed that morning.
Strange - doesn't mention Nicotine. I believe in patch or lozenge this has as much affect as caffeine [1]. Note that I'm not advocating smoking, just the nicotine itself.
Recently listened to a Freakonomics podcast[1] about how to make people quit smoking. There were two related points that stuck with me.
1. Nicotine can have a lot of positive benefits. As one of their experts stated, “Good drug, bad delivery system.”
2. One of those benefits is a possible anti-depressant effect. So smoking may inadvertently be treating a person’s undiagnosed mental health issue[2], an additional difficulty when trying to quit smoking.
This second point has made me a little more compassionate towards smokers, and to the difficulty of quitting. (As least in theory, still get annoyed when I can smell cigarette smoke on myself after a trip down to the shops because of some smoker on the sidewalk.)
If it's just about nicotine though one can use gum, patches, vaporisers - in fact I can't really see why anyone would smoke now, you can get the drug in a cleaner way more cheaply by vaping.
It seems like choosing to chug anti-freeze when you've got high-class liquor available.
> In a test which involved pressing a button when I saw a light go on, my reaction times improved from an average of 650 milliseconds before the machine was turned on, to 550 milliseconds with it on. These findings are in line with results from other subjects.
The average reaction time is 256 milliseconds on this web site:
I have no idea how the quoted test was formatted, but a twitch reaction when a subject is prepared for it within a short time-frame (10s like this website) will be much faster than a test where the subject rests or is made to focus on another task for longer periods between sampling.
Also, It sounds like that particular sample was from a cohort of stroke victims, perhaps the stroke also affected their reaction times, or stroke victims represent a generally older demographic and have slower reaction times outright than the younger cohort a website might be measuring.
Get something COLD (ice pack, a can of pop from the fridge, bag of ice. Even a swath of paper towels that have been run under a cold-running faucet for a while can do the trick
Place it on your forehead, centered, just above your eyes.
That always jolted me awake for a good 15-30 mins, though your mileage may vary.
I am not sure of the science behind it, though I do remember reading it on some sort of lifehacker-type blog, so I didn't invent this.
Anyone else enjoy a very, very short nap? If I'm feeling sleepy I just find a spot to close my eyes for less than five minutes. Once a bit of hypnogogic imagery appears behind my eyelids, I quit, get up and go back to work. I get a few hours of wakefulness from doing just this.
I used to drive a lot and and would regularly become extremely, and indeed dangerously, sleepy. I recall reading at the time that sleeping for around 12 minutes would relieve sleepiness, but that any more than that would actually make you more tired. After doing no research whatsoever, I put this into practice, and it worked, remarkably well. And it still does, 15 years later, though I drive a lot less now. I recommend it to anyone with the same problem.
[edit] when I say it worked well, I mean that after that short sleep (using an alarm of course, without which I would have slept for hours), I could continue driving for several hours without feeling sleepy again.
"Overall, regular caffeine consumers who'd been without caffeine overnight, were slower on the reaction time task, were sleepier and were less mentally alert than non-users,"
