From close experience the process of waking up can, for some people, be a slow and uncertain process and requires coffee, food and stimulus to get the brain into gear.
I am wondering whether there are any professions [I’m guessing along the lines of aircraft pilots or surgeons] where this is acknowledged and, for example, you are not allowed to drive or cut someone open less than X hours after a proper sleep.
I’m aware of a continuing debate about the benefits and risk of running medical interns ragged with long and stacked shifts until they are dead on their feet, and also of airline pilot rostering to accommodate time-zones. This question is more about required capacity to work after a solid sleep.
TLDR, they can force you to take a break, but they can’t make you sleep.
I’ve never heard of any profession requiring someone to actually be asleep for X hours, but there are some pretty strict rules around truck drivers that dictate how long they can be on the road for and how long they’re required to be ‘off duty’ or resting. It’s why some trucking companies send two* drivers on long hauls. It gives them the ability to cover a lot more distance without stopping.
It looks like pilots have similar requirements tailored to their profession. Their rest period is referred to as an ‘uninterrupted opportunity for sleep’. In the trucking industry, WRT sleep during their rest/off duty times the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration stated “We have no control over the manner in which a driver may spend his time off-duty, although some of his spare time activities may tire him as much as any work would do. We can only emphasize, by this comment, the responsibility which is the driver’s own to assure himself of adequate rest and sleep, in the time available for this purpose, to ensure safety of his driving, and likewise the employer’s responsibility to see that his drivers report for work in fit condition” From here.
*I thought I’d heard some trucking companies using three drivers so the truck would never stop moving, but the rules are somewhat convoluted and I’m not sure if they’re required to be out of the truck for a certain number of hours or just not at the controls.
26 years as a firefighter. I can wake up and be “fully booted” within about 3 seconds, given the right wake up sound (the tones that play over the radio to announce a run). My 3am thinking is about the same quality as my 3pm thinking. I stagger a bit if its within an hour or so of falling asleep, but I am still out of bed and processing before anyone else I know - including many of my shift-mates.
Same rapid boot-up once my daughter was born. Any abnormal sounds that came from the direction of her room at night and I was ready to go before my feet hit the floor.
Granted, if you wake me up after 2am, I’m not going back to sleep for the rest of the night, so it isn’t all good stuff.
We did not have any requirements for sleep before or during work. It is generally frowned upon to sleep during the day, but there have been plenty of times (usually in June) where I was in bed before the sun had set. There have also been plenty of shifts where I was awake for 24 hours. You’re on duty, you do what needs to be done regardless of sleep.
No general requirements for time between waking up and flying for pilots. If it’s the start of the duty then there is normally plenty of time getting ready, travelling to work, planning the flight etc before you are actually flying.
The time where it might be a concern is on long haul flights when the pilots have had a rest in the cruise. I’m sure our company has rules about time between waking up and having to fly the descent and approach but I don’t know how rigid they are and I don’t have them in front of me.
To be honest I think the people who “need a coffee” are full of shit. They’ve just got themselves comfortable with a routine. Send a sabre tooth tiger in to their bedroom to wake them up and I think you’ll find they are quite alert without coffee or whatever else they think they need.
That said, it is true that people need some time to shake off the effects of sleep.
Sure, one time I found my kitchen was on fire I leapt out of bed plenty fast. But, OTOH, I’m generally groggy in the mornings and I would be willing to bet that if you were to hook me up to an EKG my brain state would still be a little slower than alpha.
Note also that there is a bit of a dependency effect with caffeine: if you regularly have a morning coffee, you may need to have that coffee to attain the same alertness level as a non coffee drinker (ill dig out a cite later)
For me, it was having children. Before that, I could easily doze in bed until 11AM - after raising children, a ‘nice lie in at the weekend’ meant staying in bed until 7AM
It’s much the same in the EU. A driver who sleeps in the bunk in his truck could, theoretically, crawl out of his pit, get behind the wheel and drive off.
In practice, of course, there would usually be time to do what most people do between getting up and going to work. In addition, the inspectors expect to see a gap between ‘clocking on’ and starting to drive. This is for the driver to carry out a visual inspection of his truck.
Rest periods are strictly monitored but there is no rule, apart from not working, about what a driver should actually do. The minimum rest is 9 hours and if the driver lives an hour’s drive away from base, that leaves little time for actual rest.
It is true that people take some time to shake off their sleep (sleep inertia), I just don’t buy that the “need a coffee” crowd are any different from the rest of us.
But, if you agree that sleep inertia is a thing, and presumably you agree that coffee is a stimulant, I don’t get where the vitriolic statement about the coffee crowd being “full of shit” came from.
Anyway, I found a couple of cites about my more specific point. Caffeine’s mode of effect is to block adenosine receptors in the brain, and there is data to show that frequent coffee drinkers have more adenosine receptors. Adenosine as a neurotransmitter is involved in sleep and drowsiness, so more receptors implies that caffeine may be needed just to arrive at the alertness state of a non coffee drinker.
And there are studies coming at this from the other side, just following frequent coffee drinkers and testing their level of alertness. They support the same conclusion of “caffeine withdrawal”.
It wasn’t meant to be vitriolic sorry, I should’ve softened the words.
I agree with all your points but my conclusion is not that they need coffee but that they probably need to stop drinking coffee.
I may be biased by the fact that I understand that caffeine is supposed to be a stimulant but it has no noticeable affect on me. I feel no difference having a coffee or not having a coffee so I don’t really understand people who say they need a coffee just to function in the morning. If coffee didn’t exist would they mope around all day or would they just get on with life?
Back in the day I worked the midnight shift at a hospice. At break time, typically around 3:00 am, I would lie down for an hour, always falling asleep. Everyone did this.
Break time over, it was up and at 'em. I was always groggy as hell, but it was time to start passing out the morphine, often in very large doses.
It frequently occurred to me that I was in no shape to be doling out narcotics, but that never stopped me from taking my lie-down.
My mother drinks decaf. She still has to have her coffee in the morning. It is her waking up ritual.
She is not a morning person. My dad and I are both morning people, meaning we both normally wake up before the alarm goes off on work days, and even get up relatively early on weekends. Coffee’s nice to have in the morning, but not necessary for getting moving. I tend to have something caffeinated to make sure that I don’t get a caffeine headache.
I would think that those people who need multiple alarms to get up in the morning and/or use the snooze button a lot, are not the people who do well in positions that require someone to be fully functional just after waking.
We wouldn’t accept that someone needs some other drug to pep them up in the morning. We wouldn’t casually accept that some people need a snort of cocaine to really wake up, even if there are proven physical effects, we would say they have become dependent on the drug and need to stop taking it.
I think that’s a bit much.
I would agree that the cycle of caffeine withdrawal is not a positive thing, but if any degree of dependence = “snort of cocaine” then my dependence on my alarm clock also makes me a junkie.
I was specifically equating two stimulants, not just things you depend on to wake up.
I’m also not suggesting a coffee drinker is a junkie, I’m just saying if you honest to god can’t function without coffee in the morning then you don’t need coffee, you need to stop coffee.
We do live in a society that is really, really rigid about time, though, in a way that wasn’t usual until 100 years ago or so. You could just as easily say “if someone needs a shot of caffeine every morning, maybe they should be sleeping another hour or two,” but that is just not a practical option for most people.
Sure, many of us have seen the effects of adrenaline. You can go from “too drunk to cook steak and eggs” to “sober enough to fight a kitchen fire” pretty quickly.