What Is Microsleeping?

Over the years, more and more people have come to understand the true dangers of drowsy driving and the fatal risks it poses to drivers.

This includes a bigger spotlight on microsleeping, a phenomenon that many drowsy drivers will experience.

Looking into microsleep

WebMD discusses microsleeping and its impacts. First of all: what is it? Microsleep refers to the bursts of one to three seconds in which a person loses consciousness due to briefly falling asleep. This happens when the body is too tired to stay awake and attempts to force itself to sleep, whether or not the person wants to.

Needless to say, this is a huge risk for drivers because it completely robs them of their senses for a few seconds. While this might not seem like a lot of time, three seconds is all the time it takes for a driver to drive the length of a football field when going at 60 miles an hour, or typical speeds on the highway.

Microsleep leads to dangerous crashes

In fact, many of the most dangerous accidents happen because of a person’s inability to stay awake. During these periods of unconsciousness, these people will veer off the side of the road, drive into oncoming traffic, and rear-end other cars at high speeds.

Many of these accidents are potentially fatal because the driver has no time at all to blunt the dangers by reacting even in the last second.

Due to these reasons, drowsy driving and the related risk of microsleep are very real dangers that drivers should avoid.