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Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dr. Nicholas Mabbott. It also goes by the name Dr. Nick from Beyond Midnight Consulting. He’s a sleep and fatigue risk specialist. Today, we’re very excited to have the first of two conversations with Dr. Nick. Today, we’re going to get into the topic of Distracted Driving Awareness Month and get into some very specific, tangible ideas around distracted driving and sleep and fatigue and how it impacts driving. Dr. Nick, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Thank you very much, Eric. I’m looking forward to this podcast.

Maybe let’s get started with a bit of background about yourself and how you got into this space of sleep and fatigue.

Yes, it was an interesting transition because I started out life at 14 years old as a timber worker.

Wow, very different.

Then after 18 years, my then-wife gave birth to twins. After five weeks of having twins at home, I handed my notice in because I was concerned, I would not be able to count to 10 anymore. I was losing a lot of sleep at that time. I then transitioned into university in psychology. During my tenure at Murdoch University in Western Australia, I was fortunate enough to work with an internationally recognized a fatigue expert, Associate Professor Lawrence Hartley, who has a lot of colleagues in the States and Canada. I did a bit of work with him interviewing truck drivers regarding fatigue and stimulant use. That’s where I got my teeth into it. I really enjoyed the fact that these truck drivers who we all thought were the terrors of the highways were actually better behaved than most normal drivers of passenger vehicles because that’s their likelihood. They needed to ways of either getting a little bit of sleep here and there whenever they needed to or taking a few stimulants, whether they be just low-grade stimulants across the counter. Some of them did take a little bit harder stuff, but I’m not going to encourage that, obviously.

But a lot of them had some really good ideas for managing to avoid fatigue and keeping other drivers safe on the road. So, I walked away from that with a very big respect for long distance truck drivers, even though a lot of researchers still target them for some reason. When you look at the crash statistics, they feature very low compared to passenger vehicles.

Interesting.

Yeah. And then I went into this group called ARRB Transport Research, and I spent eight and a half years as a research scientist and then I thought, now I need to get out of here and walk away from academia and get into practicing what I know with the aid of… Well, with the idea of helping people to do better than they currently do. Because what I learned along the way, it’s not that much about managing fatigue, it’s more about managing your sleep so you don’t become unstacked in the first place. That was the transition over about 28 years.

Interesting. Let’s touch a little bit on roadside safety because almost every employer that has either employee that are in a fleet of vehicles that are moving between locations, not just transport vehicles, but you’ve got utility workers, you’ve got a lot of repair workers that are regularly on the road for different elements of work. Almost every employer has people that are coming in before their shifts or after their shift, driving to work. Something that I think impacts almost everybody, and we hear of the toll of roadside safety. You are involved in many investigations, unfortunately, after the fact. Tell me a little bit about the case for roadside safety and why organizations should focus on it.

Currently, the focus on it is quite good with most organizations. However, it’s some of the ideas that drive that focus is a little incorrect. For example, a lot of groups, if you are driving more than 60 minutes to or from work, they may get you to do a journey management plan. What I say to them is the length of the drive is important, but what is more important is how much sleep that driver has had the previous evening before getting in the vehicle and driving, because some of crashes that I’ve investigated have been as short as five minutes and 35 seconds driving the vehicle.

Really?

The bulk of them tend to be within the first hour of driving. I mean, that’s not the case with all drivers, but we need to recognize that it’s not just the length of the drive, and it’s not just how long a person is awake, it’s how much sleep they’ve got, and therefore, how much brain fuel do they have before they start the drive. So that’s It’s just the important thing to remember for anyone running a business that has people driving to or from work, but groups of salespeople who are traveling all over the country and things like that. They need to recognize that the best drive is done when that person has had seven to eight hours of sleep the night before. Six hours is okay, five hours is not okay.

This gets interesting in that for a lot of employees, it’s very easy to understand how long you were at work. It’s easy to understand what your mental load was, physical load during the day. It’s much harder to understand how well you slept because unless you’re advocating to put monitoring devices on employees, becomes very challenging. You can know how many hours you were away from work, but that’s not necessarily correlated with sleep because you could have had 12 hours between shifts. Yes. But did all sorts of different things that kept you awake; you could have had very long commutes. Tell me a little bit about how you can address something like this in those circumstances?

It’s too hard to address it with a heavy fist, so to speak. You cannot regulate what people do outside of work. The best I have found that you can do is educate the employees with the right information, and that is that sleep is often overlooked in its importance. When I teach people about sleep, I don’t just teach them about sleep and safety. I teach them about sleep and health and wellness and longevity. And once you start talking about their personal life, that’s where people do get intrigued. They get involved and they go, all right, I want me some of that. So now teach me how to sleep better. Sure. That needs to be a part of the package. I’ve heard so many academics say to groups, you need to get eight hours of sleep, even if you’re on night shift, things like that. And I’m not bagging academics. They know what they know, and they know that eight hours is a pretty good number. But you need to help people understand that there are easy ways to get the sleep and hard ways to get the sleep and things like that. In my 28 years doing this, I’ve become something of a sleep specialist, and I have my own theory about sleep timing that has helped thousands of people, literally. 

That very brief theory, I won’t tell you the story about how I got to it because that’s quite a long one, but 16 hours and 10 minutes after you wake up, most people get a first sleep wave, which runs for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, and it’s just a series of three or four yawns. If you’re in bed right then and right there, you will be asleep without even knowing it. That is amazing because most people will then get in excess of seven and a half hours of sleep, which is perfect for most normal healthy humans. If you miss that sleep wave by five minutes because you’re sitting on the lounge and you want to catch the last eight minutes of Netflix, then when you go to bed, you’ll find you can’t sleep for at least an hour. And the science behind that is that the first dose of melatonin you get that actually downregulates part of your brain to allow you to sleep, actually, I think receding after that first 10 minutes, and then the brain becomes highly charged again, and you will not sleep until you get that second dose of melatonin, which comes about an hour or so later.

Interesting.

A lot of people have come back to me and say, hey, I did your 16 hours and 10 minutes. It works like a charm. It seems the one thing missing out of the sleep sciences. I did put that in my book in the hope that that would tease a few academics into thinking, I’m going to test this theory. It sounds like rubbish to me. So, I’m hoping they will because they get the funding to do it. I’ve tested it with thousands of people, and the general consensus is this works amazing.

Interesting. You talked about seven to eight hours of sleep, six being perhaps okay. What about the people that tell you, I’m special, I don’t need this much sleep, I can operate on a lot less sleep?

Yes, well, they are indeed special, but mainly only to themselves.

We all are special. 

We’re all special in some way. In 28 years and 34,000 people that I’ve been in front of, I connected with three people who honestly believe that four hours of sleep was all they needed, a bit like Maggie Thatcher some decades ago. In discussing this with those people, they were healthy, they weren’t type 2 diabetic, they weren’t obese, and they didn’t have excessive daytime sleepiness, which is my set of questions that I did them. I thought, well, this is unusual. Maybe they are okay on four. Two years ago, one of those who I kept in contact with reached out and said, hey, Dr. Nick, can you please help me get six- or seven-hours sleep? I have serious heart problems now, and I believe it’s because I’ve been living on four hours sleep. And so, I did help him get above six hours of sleep. So, I think some people can do it for a while, but I think it creeps on them, and it takes away a lot from their life if they’re not careful. If you think back to Maggie Thatcher, she ended up with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and passed away from a series of strokes, both of which are exacerbated by a lack of sleep, not caused by, but exacerbated by.

Interesting. In fact, that link between Alzheimer and sleep, I think, is getting more attention lately as well. But not the topic of distracted driving today, but I have noticed there’s been more conversation on the potential connections between the two. We can talk about that in the next podcast, The Science of Sleep. 

Absolutely. When it comes to distracted driving, one of the things we had talked about when we first connected was lucky escapes. Tell me a little bit about what those are.

Lucky Escapes are most people who drive a vehicle will, at some point in their driving life, have microsleeps. Now, the thing about… I talk about microsleeps, and I talk about true sleep. A microsleep is what we regard as a 2-5 second eye closure. In that time, you are not aware of your surroundings at all, not the roadway, not the people around you, anything like that. And for those 2 to 5 seconds, your brain trying to shut down your eyes and all of your senses in an effort to recycle more energy because you are running low. In those 2 to 5 seconds, it’s usually just enough to make your vehicle wander a little bit, and often it will still stay within the lane boundaries. It only really becomes a problem if there is a bend in the road and you’re not seeing it because if at that point, which I call stage one sleep, your eyes can be open, but there’s no one there. You know what I mean? That old saying, the lights are on, but no one’s home. That That’s what I class as driving without awareness. That driving without awareness can run for about 7 to 10 minutes, which is the total of stage one sleep.

In that time, you can stay on the road, and most people do avoid crashes, unfortunately, some don’t because if something steps on the road suddenly, the reaction time is usually three, four, or even five seconds slow, and they will hit that, and that’s the end of everything. Most people who have the two to five second microsleep, if they wander across the center line from the left-hand camber to a right-hand camber, just that movement with their head is enough to wake them up out of stage one, and they will let them return to their lane. I’ve had two cases of this in Queensland and one in New South Wales, where drivers coming towards me have drifted to the wrong side of the road in front of me. Because I drive fully aware, I have usually four or five seconds of, oh, look out. I’ll wipe off as much speed as possible and look for an exit route. I would rather hit a small tree at 40 km an hour than have a 200K impact.

Head-on collision.

I have avoided some of them. I was telling someone the other day about a very near a real lucky escape that I had with my twin babies. They were in the back of the car in child restraints. I was driving down the freeway before it was grade separated, and they had these stop lights and the orange flashing lights. The orange flash and light come on, and I had a fair bit of time before that. I just put the foot off the accelerator, got ready for the orange light to come on. When the orange light come on, I started slowing. As I come to a stop, I looked in the rear view mirror and I saw that there was a semi-trailer behind me, fully locked up, All the tires were smoking, and I literally had to run the red light and go left, and he barreled through, probably at least 80 or 90 kilometers an hour, which keeps on, reminded me. Every time I slow down to stop, I’m always in the rear-view mirror to see what’s- Never assume the others are doing what they should be doing, and they were paying attention. Absolutely. Never assume.

For that reason, about four months ago at my local shopping center, I was walking across a crosswalk and there was a vehicle coming, and I have a rule, always make eye contact with the driver so that you know that they know you’re there. I looked at this lady and she was not looking. I ran because it would have taken too long to stop and turn around. I ran two steps and then literally jumped over her bonnet to save myself going to the vehicle. When I jumped over the bonnet, two hands on the bonnet to help flip me over there, and that got her attention very quickly. 

I would imagine.

She was looking at a car reversing out in the car park. It looked like it was going to hit another car. To her, that was important.

Often, our attention goes somewhere else, not on what needs to happen.

Exactly right. I did revise it on the rules.

Let’s touch a little bit on how our brain functions and how it processes sleep and also how it gets easily distracted. Can you tell us a little bit about the science of it?

Absolutely. I’ll just give you the basic of brain the fuel that we get in sleep, and the rest of the sleep science we’ll talk about in the next podcast. Basically, when we sleep, well, actually, I’ll just go back to when we’re awake. Sure. The brain uses a fuel known as adenosine triphosphate. That is one molecule of adenosine attached to three molecules of phosphate. It’s almost like a truck and trailer configuration. This gets taken into the neuron the brain nerves, and the phosphate gets dropped into the neurons to power up the neurons so that you can do everything your brain does, looking, listening, smelling, talking, whatever. Once you’ve dropped off that phosphate, you have the adenosine molecule just floating around in the brain, minding its own business. It’s not a waste product at all because the buildup of this adenosine molecule in the brain causes neurons to stop firing off. It does this because each neuron has adenosine receptors. Once these receptors are full of adenosine, that neuron is resigned to not working until the next day when you get a new load of fuel. Sure. The easiest way of thinking this, it’s a little bit harsh, but the longer we’re awake, the dumber we get.

Less fuel equals your brain not fully working, so parts of it or millions of neurons will not be firing off, and so you are then left with some parts of your brain working and some not so good. This is what does lead to some of the distraction because you don’t have all your faculties to look down the road to analyze what’s going on around you. I mean, in road safety terms, you should be looking five seconds down the road to see what traffic is doing and looking for errant vehicles. If you’re approaching intersections, you should be looking three seconds down that intersection to make sure you’re not going to get tea boned and things like that. When you make a decision to overtake a vehicle in front, you need to do a whole lot of planning to get that one right. So, length, speed that you need, geometry of the road, everything like that. Much of this is not working when your brain fuel load is getting low. Then once you get to a certain level of low, your brain will go, okay, we need to recycle more energy. This is pretty much the missing link in safety.

Your brain gets the adenosine molecules when we sleep adds the phosphate back to it and creates tomorrow’s brain fuel. It’s very well known. In fact, one of the US researchers, Van Dongen, one of my Well, he’s on a pedestal as far as my researchers are concerned. He once made a very bold statement of saying, for every one hour of sleep, you get two hours of brain fuel for the next day. And that’s where if you get seven or eight hours, you’re going to have a fantastic day. If you get six hours, you’ll have a good morning. Once you get to one or two in the afternoon, the brain will go, not much left. How about we catch up? Maybe you should have a little Nana nap after lunch. Most people will say, oh, that lunch has put me to sleep. No, your brain has put you to sleep because there’s not enough fuel to make it through to, didn’t dinner time, so to speak. If you’ve had four or five hours of sleep, if you get up in the morning, have a shower, get dressed, have breakfast, and an hour later, get in a car to go to work, as As soon as you sit down, the brain goes, Okay, let’s do the math.

You got four hours sleep. That’s going to give you eight hours energy. It’s going to take you to about lunchtime. That’s not enough. How about right now you’re sitting down, how about we catch up? That is when the microsleep start. You can put in a very good argument and say, No, this is too dangerous. But your brain has a high hierarchy of needs. Again, this is misunderstood. The hierarchy basically states you need oxygen, you need blood, and you need energy. These are up here. After that, you need to be safe. But it’s below falling asleep at the wheel on the hierarchy.

So even if it’s dangerous and you realize, which we’re going to get to very soon, your brain can force you to go to sleep.

Yeah.

Being very aware that this is not the time to do so.

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The research has been very good at pointing that out, that some people can dig in and muster a little bit more energy and keep on going for a while. That is true, but it is short-lived, depending on the level of sleep that they have. That five minute and 35 second crash that I spoke about, the gentleman who did that had five hours sleep the night before, and the night before, and the night before. Basically, that was his average for the month. As soon as he sat down, he did a full day’s work, and at 7: 30 in the evening, which is a really unusual time to crash because that is a circadian high point, where your body temperature comes up, cortisol kicks in, and most people do not crash around that time.

But in five minutes and 35 seconds, he hit a tree, killed his colleague, and went to jail for three years. The sad part is he’s not a bad person, but he made the wrong choice, obviously, thinking five hours of sleep is adequate when it clearly is not.

You When we talked about you introduce this element about stop before you get tired, and you introduce different levels. Tell me about it, because I think for me, it was quite interesting in terms of realizing that there’s a point where we may think we’re still okay, but we’re not okay.

Absolutely. Again, this is where the public need educating on this is what happens in these different points of our drive. It was only five years that I made the choice when I’m doing a lot of my long drives, five or six hours, to actually stop before I even felt restless. Sometimes you get a little bit restless behind the wheel, mainly because you’ve been sitting too long. Your neck gets out of shape, which reduces oxygen and blood flow to your brain, and it slightly impairs you, only slightly. But I also have friends who work in physiotherapy, exercise physiologist, that talk about how as soon as the spine gets a little bit out of shape because of your sitting down position, everything starts reducing in its capabilities and capacity in the body and brain.

Interesting.

So, I made this conscious decision. I had one four-hour drive to do, and I thought, I’m going to experiment with this. I drove roughly an hour, stopped on the side of the road, took a couple of photos. It was nice scenic stuff. I always make sure I pull far enough off the road to avoid errant vehicles. That is a very important point. Also in that drive, I did two more stops. In four hours, I stopped three times. Most people, because they’re in such a hurry, would say, oh, you’ll never get there. Well, actually, I did. And not only did I get there, just before I reached my destination, less than five minutes away from this town, but a flock of goats also comes screaming down the hill and across the road. And no, I’m not kidding. And I managed to miss every single one of them. There must have been at least 20 goats. And I was doing 80 kilometers an hour. So that stopping before I got tired kept my reflexes as sharp as a tack. You must bear in mind, though, I average seven and a half hours sleep on most nights. Every now and then, I get six hours because I’m human and stuff happens.

I even play competition pool, which gives me a late night. But every night that I do a six hour the following night, I catch up by getting just under nine hours of sleep. I am fully topped up at least every second day. Now, when I got to this town after the four hours of driving and three short breaks, which in total took about eight minutes. I mean, really, it’s eight minutes. When I got there, I was fully energized. It happened to be a little old gold town. The first thing I did was check into the hotel I was staying at and get the gold pan out and go straight down the river, digging big holes. That is the difference between getting somewhere and going, I’m done. I need a wine. I’ve done that many occasions since. Now it is Dr. Nick’s law that I I’ll only drive an hour, and I’ll take one or two-minute break. I don’t expect other people to do it. But I will say that since I’ve been doing that, I have not felt drowsy once in the last five years. Yeah, I guess moving on to the next level, if you don’t stop when you are tired and you keep sitting down for longer than an hour, and let’s reflect on most road safety professionals will say to everyone, stop every 2 hours and take a break.

Which is what the car is programmed nowadays to tell you to go for a break roughly every 2 hours of driving.

Yes, it is. Yes, a little coffee light flashes up and things like that, which is almost good advice, but they’re out by an hour, I think, according to me. That’s my professional opinion. We need to stop every hour because within an hour, if you’ve had sufficient sleep, you’re not tired. Here’s the difference. When you are not tired yet, if you pull up and take a break, well, when you’re thinking of pulling up, you look down the road and you scan for somewhere safe to stop. You can find it, you can pull up, it’s convenient, you get it over and done with, you get going. Now, if you continue to drive a bit tired and get into maybe two hours, well, then it’s quite likely that the brain starts going, well, you’re still sitting, maybe it’s time to catch up on sleep and add a bit more fuel to the brain. When you get drowsy, and this argument comes up in a courtroom a lot, people do know that they’re drowsy. The best argument for that was, if any of the researchers are listening, the best argument for that was by Horne and Reina from the UK.

They put forward a really good case on people know that they’re drowsy, and what they should understand is that drowsiness portends sleep. Now, when you are feeling drowsy and you’re driving a car, most people will choose to push through because we’ve done it a hundred times. That That’s what we call risk homeostasis. You keep getting away with it, you actually believe that the risk is reduced, but it’s not. I think risk works the other way. If you keep getting away with it, it’s time that the bad stuff might happen soon. A lot of people will push through. Those who choose to think, I’m drowsy, I should stop, because I heard this guy on a podcast saying, I should stop. At that point, because you’re already reducing capacity, you look down the road, you scan for somewhere to stop, and you look and you’re, no, no, no. Oh, that would have been good as you drive past it. And so How many people agree with that statement that they have looked for somewhere, but they drive past it, and straight away they think, well, I’m not going back. That leads to the point where the brain goes, okay, you’re giving in.

Let’s get some sleep happening. At that very point of drowsiness, your brain is literally attempting to put you to sleep, and this is where the inattention becomes a Well, it becomes the main part of your drive. This driving without awareness is the technical road safety term for it, where your eyes are open, you can scan the road. The occipital lobe of your brain, the part at the back that controls the six groups of muscles around your eyes, is shutting down, which means your eyes cannot focus on anything further than about two meters away from the end of your bonnet.

Which is not a lot of reaction time.

Not a lot of reaction time. The problem there is you can see, but you can’t process. That is the extension of the reaction time right there. Two of the cases that I have done in the last couple of years, very sad cases. These were both truck drivers. I will say that only two out of my 19 crashes were truck drivers, both of them driving without awareness. And there was a cyclist just in the lane. Far enough away from the lane center where a cyclist should drive, and both of them were taken out. You could tell by the driver’s reactions that they didn’t see them at all, they just heard this little noise, and it was all over. So, driving without awareness, you might as well put a blindfold on.

You’ve got a very narrow field vision; you can’t spot things. It’s equivalent, I believe, even to being intoxicated in terms of the effect of our brain.

Absolutely, yeah. Look, I believe that driving with five hours of sleep is probably the equivalent of starting your drive at 0. 05 blood alcohol. Just a couple of standard drinks.

Just starting.

Yeah. And the longer you drive, obviously, the more tired you will get.

And correct me I’m wrong, but once you’re drowsy, from what I’m hearing, once you’re drowsy, you don’t even realize that you’re transitioning from being drowsy to being sleepy. And at sleepy, you start losing that awareness in front of you.

Yes. People, I think, need to understand the reason we do stage one sleep, which is drowsy, that is the brain’s way of saying, go and lay down because you are about to fall asleep. If we didn’t do stage one, we would literally drop where we stand because stage two, we lose our muscle control. And you’ve seen people with narcolepsy. People with narcolepsy basically don’t do stage one sleep. They don’t get drowsy. They just go from… And just crash, which is dangerous. Most of them can’t drive, they can’t work, and they can’t live a normal life because when their brain says sleep’s happening, they don’t even get time to think about it. They’re just on the. 

There’s no warning.

So, people without narcolepsy, which is the bulk of the population, will get drowsy. And as Jim Horne from UK states, drowsiness portends sleep. And at some point, when you are drowsy, you won’t know, but you will be asleep. Some of the remarks that you get from drivers are just incredible. For example, one of the gentlemen who crashed a couple of years ago, in his statement, he said, I don’t know what happened, but I woke up and the car was rolling over. But I woke up. So, we didn’t know what happened, but he woke up. Another guy in a crash that I analyzed a year and a half ago, he said, I opened my eyes, and the car was going down an embankment. I’m thinking, it’s good to have your eyes open when you drive. It was clearly a slight.

There’s no warning other than this drowsy period. I think most people think, Drowsy, I can continue. How much time, if I’m starting to feel drowsy, do I need to be able to nap in order to continue driving? Because you said, If I’m feeling tired, I basically need to get out, stretch, get some fresh air, stop on the side of the road in a safe location, if I’m correct. But when you get drowsy, what’s the amount of time you need to recuperate.

Yeah. I think people need to think, if I’m drowsy, my brain is needing energy, and the only way I can give it energy is to sleep and recycle energy. Now, Van Dongen said that for every one hour of sleep, you get two hours of brain energy. That is slightly different when you have a 20-minute nap. We call it a power nap because that power nap can produce two hours’ worth of energy. As Horne and Reina did back in the 1998, I think it was, they showed that if you have a strong coffee and then follow by a 20-minute nap immediately, that buys you a bit more than 2 hours as well.

Because the caffeine doesn’t kick in right away. 

Yes. Caffeine takes at least 20 minutes. And I didn’t have to, but I did semi-investigate a crash we had a few years ago where a guy stopped. He was drowsy, and he got a can of Red Bull and smashed it down and drove straight off. But within 15 minutes, he fell asleep, rolled his car several times, killed him and his wife. It’s just really sad because all he needed to do to enhance that was to jump in the back seat, have a 20-minute nap, get mom and the kids to go off into the playground, and even have a walk or something while he napped. The two of them would still be alive now, and I wouldn’t have a story, And I’ve heard these many times. There was a gentleman that the police were telling me about. He was driving in the Pilbara of Western Australia. He stopped at a service station for 15 minutes but then drove off and died within 10 minutes. Clearly, he needed a nap, but didn’t have a nap.

He just stopped.

Yeah. If you’re drowsy, a nap is the best thing. If you’re tired, a short break fixes it. If you’re drowsy, just lay down on the back seat, set your Timer on your phone to 20 minutes. If you don’t fall asleep, you didn’t need the nap. Most people will fall asleep, and 20 minutes will go by, it’ll feel like seconds. The alarm goes off, you go, wow, was that 20 minutes already? I also recommend getting up, walking around the car a couple of times to get the blood flowing, oxygen going again, and then have a think. How do I feel? If you feel good, drive. If you don’t feel good, you might want to consider rehydrating, maybe eating some food as Well, then see how you feel and make the decision, but make it a better decision.

Those who say if you’re feeling tired, drowsy, open the windows, listen to music, or take a Red Bull or caffeine. It doesn’t sound like that works.

All of those things will literally buy you seconds of okay. People can dig down and really get a little bit more, and it might last a minute might last two minutes. But then the brain goes, okay, are you comfortable again? You want to wind the window back up because it’s a bit cold. You want to turn that music on? It’s a bit horrible. It’s a bit loud. It is short last and here’s just a little bit on top of that. Out of the 19 crashes that I’ve investigated, 12 of the drivers had 5. 5 or less hours of sleep. That’s the main contributing tractor, 10 of the 19 drivers had passengers who were all asleep. When your passengers are asleep, you don’t do those things that you just spoke about, winding down the window, singing like no one’s listening. No one. You drive, you keep quiet because they look so peaceful, but you are literally risking their life because if you crash, it’s normally one of them who passes away. So, we need to rethink that, too. And if you’re the passenger in any vehicle, you have one job. That is to keep an eye on that driver and make sure they’re okay.

If I’m your passenger, I’ll apologize now. If we get to our destination, your ears might be bleeding, but you will not- But you will be there.

You will arrive.

Yes. And if you If you look drowsy at all, and I’m your passenger, I’m not going to ask you, Are you okay? Because you will definitely say, No, I’m fine. Even if your eyes were just closing, you will say, I’m fine. I will say, I need to go to the toilet. Can you please stop right here? When they stop, that’s when I’ll say to them, you were looking sleepy. I’m driving. And if not, while you’ve stopped, I’m out of here.

Dr. Nick, thank you so Thank you so much for joining me today. Very insightful. A couple of takeaways. Sleep really does matter, and the consistency of that sleep to refuel, to re-energize matters. We go very quickly from being tired to drowsy, to our brain forces us to fall asleep, which means the education, the awareness is so critical in business and industry and in people who are driving in general. The minute you feel tired, stop, even if it’s every hour, stretch, walk. When you start getting drowsy, you must stop now and you must take a 20-minute nap, was my main takeaway, to stay out of trouble while we’re driving. But some very good tips in terms of just being aware of the hazards and how all of us can fall into these traps and start drifting and the consequences are substantial.  

They are. It’s not just about us. It’s about us being able to avoid errant vehicles on the road. In front of 34,000 people, I’ve only had probably less than 20 say, I have never had a microsleep in a vehicle.

I’m not surprised. We get so lucky. We get lucky. Dr. Nick, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, obviously, we’re recording another episode on the science of sleep and some of the other key themes that impact safety. But if somebody wants to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

They can look up the website, which is Beyond Midnight Consulting, or they can look me up on LinkedIn. Just type in Dr. Nicholas Mabbott, and you can reach me through there, or go to nick M, or you can just email me directly [email protected].

Au. Excellent. Thank you so much, nick.

Thank you, Eric. It’s been great talking to you. I love sharing this information, and any opportunity really pleases me because we may be saving people from risk in their lives.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.