How To Keep Yourself Awake

Its important to have tips and tricks to help keep yourself awake, alert and attentive. Everything listed below won’t work equally well for everybody as they did for me. You might prefer one technique over another but all of them have helped me out tremendously. Also, everything is not listed below.

Find Music That Energizes You

Most people have certain types of music that will calm you down, or put you in a certain mood. Identify the music that causes you to get hype and become more alert. For me it is something with a nice funky beat. Dr. Dre comes to mind. If there is a type of music that automatically causes you to bounce your head or tap your fingers then that music to keep you awake.

Do a Quick Truckers Workout

Do 20 Pushups, 20 Situps, 20 Jumping Jacks. I did pushups and situps before ever getting out of the bunk as regular exercise. I mostly only did jumping jacks between sets of pushups and situps prior to driving in the middle of the night to keep my energy up.

It works very well. Works well if you find yourself sleepy and you need to wake yourself up too. (Don't try it while your are actually driving, lol)

Eat a Reasonably Balanced Diet

You don’t have to be obsessed with your diet. All you have to do is develop some good eating habits. It’s preventive maintenance for being energetic and not having to fight sleepiness for no reason. Eat a poor diet and you will walk around all day feeling tired and sleepy even if you slept all night.

I have talked about the diet that I used to lose weight and get more healthy. Here are some of the choices that I made.

I started the day with Oatmeal, no sugar, coconut oil, raisins, banana
Limit all sugar intake (Includes energy drink
Limit bread intake
Drink at least 64 ounces of water a day
Eat protein every day (I ate Tuna, peanut butter)

The important things is to have a great overall health selection of food. Not the junk food that most travelers and drivers make.

Massage Your Temple on Forehead

There are many pressure points on the body. Several are said to help with alertness. Before I learned of this though, I found myself rubbing my temple on both sides of my head and it always provided some relief from feeling drained. Usually only temporarily but sometimes that was all that needed to buy time for pulling over either to do some exercise or take a nap. Simple yet effective. If you research pressure points you will find in depth information about the pressure points on your body.

Take a Short Break

If you have 20 minutes to spare, find a safe place to pull over. Set your alarm for 15 minutes and take a short sleep break. You would be surprised at how refreshed you will feel after just 15 minutes with your eyes closed and mind quite.

Other Ideas

Drink coffee black or just ad some creamer but also with an extra shot of caffeine assume you don't have intense reaction to caffeine
Call someone that makes you life or is interesting with your hands free device
Listen to an audio book that interests you
Play on the CB

If you have other techniques that you found effective post them below.