FLEET MANAGEMENT
SLEEPING
AWAKE
Written By Scott Murray
Australiasian Fleet Management Association
The world demands more and more of us every day,
but we can’t deny our need to sleep. Getting behind
the wheel is already arduous without having to
battle fatigue. Here’s how you can.
Live in Australia? Chances are you’ve heard the
thunderous nightly scurry of possums using your roof
as a racetrack. They screech, claw, jump and bicker
over territory and food, and because Jack wants the
most available Jill. A nocturnal society designed over
thousands of years to function best when the sun is set,
and they do so with intensity, precision and dexterity.
Every bloody night.
Humans do not. We are very different from possums,
obviously. We don’t function at night like they’re
biologically programmed to, and yet we push the
boundaries every time we jump behind the wheel after
a day of performing at our best.
You’ve heard the road safety campaigns telling you
to ‘Revive and survive’, or how, ‘You can’t fight sleep’.
Some can probably recall TAC’s 1994 ad where a young
couple sets off for a weekend in the country on a Friday
night, after a week of work. The young male, having
driven all night, eyes hanging out of their sockets,
sails their Kombi van into the side of a tip-truck. It’s
a gory string of images which shocked viewers then,
and still makes you flinch today. But yet, in our techriddled world of reminders, alarms and never-ending
schedules, remembering to take a break seems at the
bottom of our To Do List.
Prof. David Hillman, chairman of the Seatbelt
Foundation and an expert on the science of sleep,
says fatigue is getting the better of us, which is quite
normal. What isn’t, in his opinion, is our understanding
of it and our demonstrated behaviour while fatigued.
He begins with the basics.
“Fatigue is an interesting word. It has a couple of
meanings and it’s different from getting tired from
digging in the garden or lifting heavy boxes, cured by
taking a rest. Mental fatigue is from inadequate quality
sleep,” he said. “One meaning is often confused with the
other and just taking a break isn’t always what’s needed.
Having a ‘powernap’ is one way of coping with it.”
Looking closely at the dynamics of sleep, David says,
is a good way to understand how you can manage the
dangers of fatigue.
“If you have a powernap of 10-15 minutes, you rest, but
don’t get into what’s called ‘slow wave sleep’. This is
what gives you ‘sleep inertia’, that unwell feeling you get
after sleeping a little longer and the effect is worse than
before you dozed off. You need a bit of recovery, but if you
continue driving with sleep inertia it can be a bad idea.”
But David emphasises we shouldn’t be getting to the
point of needing a powernap. It’s easy to forget in
today’s society we have basic physiological needs like
food, water and sleep.
“Most of us are, or should be, in the usual 7-8 hour
band of sleep. But many of us are now trying to push
GOVLINK » ISSUE 3 2016
69