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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3244 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 25, 2024

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I've been taking driving lessons recently in my late 30s (never bothered to before as I lived in the city) and I'm surprised by how it drains me. It's not anxiety, I'm not nervous about driving. There's nothing different about me before I go to a class. But I feel extremely tired after a 1 hour driving class, almost as if I'm sick, my brain get foggy. My current theory is that driving being an unfamiliar and potentially deadly activity my brain goes in an hyperfocused state that is extremely tiring to maintain for an hour. If that's the case I imagine it will get better as my degree of familiarity improves?

Did anyone else here have that experience of extreme tiredness for an only moderately long driving session? Did it improve? Were you a teen or an adult when you learned? I'm wondering if maybe teen brains get used to it faster.

I used to not have that but got it as I grew older. FWIW I've been driving moderate amounts since I was 18, and now in my mid-thirties I notice myself becoming very sleepy at the wheel whenever the drives grow long or the hours late. I can manage 1000km in a day just fine, mechanically, but man do I feel it. Driving at night ditto. It takes constant effort to keep my eyes open.

Maybe I would get to that point if I kept driving longer, but what I'm describing seems like the opposite of that. I am not in any way sleepy or tired while driving, but after I feel a sort of crash, as if my brain had to tap into some emergency reserves to keep itself in that state of focus for an hour.

I saw the difference, but it may still be related - my theory there would be that we both tap into the same reserves, but your shorter drives don't fully deplete them.

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