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Acute Sleep Deprivation
Staying awake beyond the normal builds an immediate sleep debt. It is not an illness: it is the most common condition behind sleepiness at the wheel, and the most underestimated.
After 17 hours awake, performance drops as with 0.05% blood alcohol - the Swiss legal limit; after 24 hours, as with 0.10%, well beyond it.
The brain needs sleep to clear and consolidate. Skipping it, even for one night, slows processing, narrows attention and opens the door to microsleeps - lapses of a few seconds that go unnoticed. The longer one stays awake, the more the deficit grows, in a predictable way.
This is where science meets the road. Dawson and Reid measured that prolonged wakefulness degrades performance as much as alcohol: a long shift, a sleepless night, a trip started too early weigh like drink-driving - yet no test detects it at a checkpoint.
It is the everyday form of the danger without a sign. Acute deprivation has no clinical name and no road sign: that is why Drive Awake places it at the centre, and the circadian signal tool exists precisely to recognise it before setting off.