To support vigilance at the wheel, music or the radio is better than silence. And what is even better is to listen to the music or the radio that you love. It is an experiment carried out under the leadership of Professor Michel Lejoyeux, Psychiatrist at Bichat Hospital in Paris, which shows this.
>> Feet on the dashboard, rolling the window open, sleeping on the highway: seven questions to a policeman before leaving on vacation
97 volunteers thus used a driving simulator, some choosing their music, their radio or their podcast, and others had an imposed programme. Result: there was less loss of alertness and feeling of fatigue when driving when you select yourself what you listen to.
But beware: listening to a playlist absolutely does not prevent you from falling asleep at the wheel. On the other hand, and this is a study published by the Scientific Research National Center (CNRS) of Bordeaux and Toulouse, which shows it: when the driver is tired and we talk to him, this allows him to partially reactivate his driving performance while waiting for the next recommended break every two hours.
Besides, when you feel sleep coming, you have to stop right away. Fatigue and drowsiness are responsible for a quarter of fatal accidents on the motorway and there’s no point in opening the window or turning up the music to fight against sleep if you feel that your eyelids are heavy, and we start to yawn. Again, studies show it: the only thing that can fight against drowsiness is a nap. Dozing off for at least 20 minutes restores alertness for a period of at least two hours. And another effective technique after a nap to maintain this vigilance is to consume coffee: swallowing caffeine, and in particular a double espresso, also reduces the risk of drowsiness and this effect starts 20 minutes after taking this coffee.
To limit the risk of drowsiness, is it better to leave in the morning or in the evening? There are no rules because, in reality, it depends on the fatigue of the driver. The recommendation of doctors is especially not to drive if you have a big debt of sleep. Statistics indicate that more and more French people have a chronic sleep debt: a quarter of young professionals, in particular, sleep less than six hours a night, on weekdays.
Another benchmark before hitting the road: the risk of drowsiness at the wheel is much greater after 17 hours of wakefulness. It is therefore very inadvisable to take the road at 11 p.m., if you got up at six in the morning, and you did not take a nap.
Note that it is possible to take stock of your sleep with a free application. It was developed by the team of Professor Pierre Phillip from the Bordeaux University Hospital and the CNRS. Her name is Kanopée. The first evaluations showed that it allowed one hour more sleep after 15 days of use, and improved sleep efficiency by 11%.