No one understands the dangers of insufficient sleep better than members of the military. Back in World War Two, the KGB and the Japanese military weaponized sleep deprivation, using it to torture POWs. In 1971, the British Army came under fire for allegedly depriving IRA members of sleep as an interrogation tactic. And the Pentagon has acknowledged employing sleep deprivation to break the will of uncooperative prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Denying a tired person shuteye for prolonged periods breaks their brain without breaking bones. It causes psychosis as soldiers slip into disoriented states and start conversing with figments of their addled minds.
Lack of shuteye also proved ruinous for pilots, who sometimes sleepily shot down their own allies or got shot down themselves because of exhaustion-induced errors. So the U.S. military devised a means of helping soldiers sleep between bouts of bedlam and bloodshed. According to Business Insider, naval ensign Bud Winter was enlisted to design and teach a sleep technique for soldiers. Winter, who had previously worked with a psychologist to boost the productivity of athletes, developed a sleep method that worked for 96 percent of soldiers after six weeks of training. Perhaps more impressively, it only took troops two minutes to transport themselves from a war zone to the Land of Nod.
And now we're going to teach it to you!
The trick consists of five distinct steps:
First, assume a comfortable position, like sitting in a soft office chair somewhere where no one will see you slacking off at work.
Next, you let the muscles in your face sag; don't hold them tight anymore.
Third, you allow your shoulders, neck, and back to go totally limp. Go full ragdoll.
The fourth step is to relax your legs.
And then there's step five, arguably the most important step. Once you're all droopy, saggy, and limp, empty your mind of all movement-related thoughts. Instead, imagine yourself in a hammock or a canoe, or simply tell yourself, "Don't think," shutting out all other thoughts for a minimum of 10 seconds.
Getting enough sleep isn't just vital for the military, it's important for everyone. According to the CDC, between 2005 and 2009 sleep deprivation caused an average of 83,000 automobile crashes resulting in 886 deaths per year. And those numbers are believed to be conservative: it's possible that drowsy driving could really be responsible for up to 6,000 fatal crashes a year.
See, as it turns out, getting behind the wheel when you haven't had enough sleep is a lot like getting behind the wheel when you've had too much alcohol. Staying up for 18 hours approximates the effects of having a blood alcohol content of .05 percent. Once you hit 24 or more hours, it's like having a blood alcohol content of .10 percent, which is above the legal limit in every state in the country.
Drowsy driving poses a danger for any motorist. But it's especially perilous for truckers, who drive long hours and are often short on sleep. A 1997 study of 80 truckers found that they spent an average of "5.18 hours in bed per day" and only got 4.78 hours of "electrophysiologically verified sleep" daily over a five-day period. A six-month study of 260 North Carolina truckers conducted in 2015 found that 46.5 percent of them averaged less than 7 hours of sleep on workdays.
Obviously, sleep deprivation and giant trucks are a recipe for disaster. In 2014, ABC reported on multiple deaths caused by exhausted truckers, including an incident in which a trucker who'd been awake for 36 hours killed a toll worker and injured a state trooper. That same year comedian Tracy Morgan suffered serious injuries and his friend, James "Jimmy Mack" McNair, lost his life when a Walmart truck collided with their vehicle. According to Rolling Stone, the driver had been awake for over 28 hours.
If anyone could benefit from the military sleep technique, it's probably these sleep-deprived truckers. So get some shut eye — and then keep on truckin'.
#Sleep #Military
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