Fit to drive

[Astraist]

When it comes to sleep patterns there is no one size fits all advice, a few people, for example, require significantly less than 6 hours a day.

Yes, there is. People are people and generally, whenever they get six hours of sleep or less, they are considered sleep deprived. How severe the phenomenon is depends on the person and if he can deal with it well and gets enough sleep at other nights, that a single drop in sleep hours won't have any practical influence.

Alternativelly, some people can be sleep deprived and still manage to get around as a life style. However, many drivers manage to get away with so many other bad driving habits that it can hardly be used as an excuse. Anyhow, it is obvious that a driver running on three hours of sleep will be less concentrated than one with six hours of sleep or seven, even if he or she will still be far from falling asleep at the wheel.

In fact, the feeling of tiredness can have many other causes, from infection, through excessive cold or heat, to simple hunger (low blood sugar causes the brain to try to conserve energy).

That much is true. I admit I didn't specify my whole specification of means of getting over the problem of fatigue while driving,

[michael769]

Yes, there is. People are people and generally, whenever they get six hours of sleep or less, they are considered sleep deprived. How severe the phenomenon is depends on the person and if he can deal with it well and gets enough sleep at other nights, that a single drop in sleep hours won't have any practical influence.

Your claim directly contradicts the opinion of competant medical professionals.

There is no set amount of time that everyone needs to sleep, since it varies from person to person. Results from the sleep profiler indicate that people like to sleep anywhere between 5 and 11 hours, with the average being 7.75 hours.

Jim Horne from Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre has a simple answer though: "The amount of sleep we require is what we need not to be sleepy in the daytime."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/ ... leep.shtml

[Astraist]

Between five to 11 hours is just about right, and close to what I said. Besides, other than the pure medical view, there is also a view on transportation, and there have been researches that investigated involvement in collisions between people that slept six hours or under, or over that limit. People with six hours of sleep or less were much more involved in collisions.

I am not stating this as a "deadline" so to speak, but as a 'rule of thumb', if you will. three or four hours of sleep, anyhow, are clearly a state of sleep deprivation, leastways if they are so each night.