Drive Awake · Perspectives · Culture
For about a month the rhythm of sleep and meals changes, and daytime sleepiness rises. Recognising it and adapting your driving is prevention, with respect.
Analysis| 26.09.2026 | Study limits clarified |
For about a month, millions of people - in Switzerland part of the roughly 6% of Muslim faith - fast from dawn to sunset. The pre-dawn meal, the suhoor, and the evening vigils break up sleep: people sleep less, and at different hours. It is no one's fault: it is what happens to the body when the timing of meals and rest shifts.
Less sleep and a disrupted rhythm mean more sleepiness during the day, which at the wheel lowers alertness and lengthens reaction times - not from muscular effort, but from sleep debt. An analysis of crash data (time-series study, Guilan province, Iran, 2013-2016) measured, during Ramadan and with traffic and other factors held equal, a 14% rise in accidents and a 19% rise in injuries, but not in deaths (DOI 10.1186/s12889-025-21980-5). The study does not measure sleep: hunger, dehydration, the rush before iftar and shorter sleep may all contribute. It is a context signal, not a verdict: these are Iranian data, not Swiss ones.
This is not one group's problem: it is a temporary, situational state that moves through the calendar and ends with the month. Speaking of it is an act of care towards part of the public who drive on the same roads, not a pointing finger. Sleepiness at the wheel has neither religion nor passport: only the occasion on which it appears changes.
A few concrete things, without medical prescriptions. Protect a window of sleep around the suhoor, even a short one. A power nap of a few minutes before getting behind the wheel, when possible. Attention to the hours when sleepiness weighs most, the early afternoon and the late day before iftar: you can see when with the road's circadian signal. And the rule that always holds: if you are sleepy, you do not drive. For clinical topics - apnoea, sleep disorders, medication - the reference is to the science, in Sleep Science.
Care, not blame
It is the same principle as all our work: to make a danger recognisable beforehand, not punishable afterwards. Here too, the danger without a signal.
Ramadan and road accidents: time-series study, Guilan province (Iran), 2013-2016, DOI 10.1186/s12889-025-21980-5.
Stay awake, at the wheel and in life.