Drowsy Driving: Waking Up at 70 MPH

It starts innocently enough — the hum of tires on asphalt, the rhythmic flash of white lines, the cabin warm enough to make the world outside feel colder and farther away. Your eyes burn a little. A blink lasts too long. You tell yourself you are fine.

And then, just for a second, the world goes black.

Drowsy driving does not always present itself with a yawn or a slump. It arrives quietly, disguised as “just a little tired.” It is the danger that creeps in unnoticed — until it is too late.

That is precisely where Rebecca Weast (writing for the Insurance Institute for Highway SAfety or IIHS) begins her exploration of this often-overlooked threat: with the kind of ordinary lapse that plays out thousands of times a day across America. Her central message is unsettling in its simplicity: fatigue is impairment. Whether it is one short night or days of accumulated debt, tiredness blunts reflexes, blurs judgment, and invites split-second mistakes. Society treats drunk driving like a crime; it treats drowsy driving like an inconvenience. Quite frankly, the physics of a highway do not care about that distinction.

The Hidden Epidemic

Drivers underestimate the risk. A blast of cold air, louder music, another coffee — the myths persist, even as the brain slips toward micro-sleeps that can turn a straight highway into a trap. Because there’s no roadside “fatigue test,” crashes often get coded as generic “driver error.” The result is a problem hiding in plain sight, normalized by culture and undercounted by data.

The Moment of Clarity

No technology can outsmart biology. Lane-departure alerts, driver-monitoring cameras, even partial automation can help — but they are safety nets, not substitutes. The fix lies upstream: how we rest, plan, and respect limits. If we treated fatigue with the same seriousness as alcohol, schedules would shift, roads would be designed for forgiveness, and the default response to drowsiness would be to pull over, not press on.

Solutions on the Road Ahead

1) Respect Sleep

“Adults should sleep seven or more hours per night on a regular basis,” says sleep physician Nathaniel F. Watson, MD, speaking for a consensus panel of leading sleep researchers. “Sleeping less than seven hours per night on a regular basis is associated with adverse health outcomes,” and sleep need varies, but skimping is not safe for performance or vigilance. In the driving context, AAA Foundation’s David Yang, PhD, puts it bluntly: “You cannot miss sleep and still expect to safely function behind the wheel… less than five hours looks comparable to driving drunk.”

2) Plan Your Trip, Not Your Luck

Expert highway guidance is practical and crisp: stop about every two hours or 100 miles, get out, move, and reset. AAA’s long-standing travel advice adds that a 20-to-30-minute nap can restore alertness on long runs — but it is a planned countermeasure, not permission to drive through fatigue. The point is not heroics; it is building breaks into the itinerary the way you plan fuel.

3) Listen to the Signs — Then Stop

Federal safety experts tell drivers to treat early signals as red lights: trouble focusing, heavy eyelids, lane drift, hitting rumble strips, or forgetting the last few miles — pull over and rest. The National Sleep Foundation echoes the same checklist and adds a crucial behavior note: once these signs appear, do not bargain (“just one more exit”); exit now and resume only when alert.

4) Use the Tools (but do not outsource your alertness)

On driver-assist and partial automation, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been clear. “Vehicle technology alone is not going to be the single solution,” says IIHS president David Harkey — systems must be built to keep drivers engaged, not lull them into inattention. Their safeguard ratings show the gap between promise and practice, underscoring why features like driver-monitoring and lane alerts are best treated as seatbelts for your attention, not autopilots for your choices.

5) Change the Culture (work, policy, and roads)

Workplaces and agencies have a role in designing out fatigue — from shift planning to rest policies — because “managing fatigue in the workplace is critical,” note occupational-health researchers, and prevention is more than telling people to sleep. At a systems level, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy urges a Safe System approach: layer defenses — rest-area access, rumble strips, forgiving roads, better vehicle safeguards — so when one layer fails, people are still protected.

A Final Word

Drowsy driving is not a mystery of willpower; it is a collision between biology and habit. Weast’s reminder lands hardest because it asks so little and promises so much: stop, rest, respect your limits. The car can wait. The destination will still be there. The miracle is waking up — before the crash.

References

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Image by Ron Lach : https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-green-jacket-driving-car-9530534/