The role of car seats
Although a car is not a big bed at home, I believe everyone has encountered such a thing: driving alone, late at night, and can't find any place to stay, so I have no choice but to Park the car on the side of the road and sleep in the car. Go to sleep and sleep. The next day when you woke up and opened the car door to get some air, you discovered that your whole body ached and your back ached, almost as uncomfortable as being beaten.
But this car seat, right? It's very comfortable when driving and sitting, but why can't I sleep all night? Is there something wrong with the design of the car seat?
Car seats are designed to:
In fact, to a certain extent, the seat is the culprit of why you wake up with soreness and back pain after sleeping in the car. To know why, first we have to understand what car seats are designed to do.
First of all, except for the long sofa-style seats used in American luxury cars in the 1970s and 1980s, the ancestor of all car seats is a hard bench. In Europe about a hundred years ago, after people invented the car, they moved it into the car with a modified upholstered chair. Later, with the development of automobiles, car seats gradually began to have backrest adjustment, front and rear adjustment, and even massage, heating and ventilation.
But in any case, the design purpose of car seats is to enable the driver and passengers (regardless of the front and rear seats) to obtain the highest safety during short-distance rides, followed by comfort. Because car seats take safety while driving as the first consideration, many designs are very different from household chairs.
The first is the design of the buttocks. Unlike household seats, car seats are designed to ensure the comfort of the occupants in a vibrating environment. Therefore, the buttocks of the car seat will sink while the thighs will be raised. At the same time, relatively high protective pads will be designed at the waist position to prevent the occupants' bodies from being thrown around when the vehicle turns. Simply put, the design element of a car seat is to wrap and restrain the body. This feature is indeed very comfortable when you are driving or sitting in a car, but it is different when you lay this kind of seat flat and plan to sleep.
Car Seat vs Mattress:
As mentioned earlier, the design element of car seats is wrapping (in fact, office chairs have the same design), but when you relax and sleep, the wrapping of car seats is not a good thing. First of all, when a person is sleeping, the entire body is completely relaxed, and all the center of gravity is placed on the object that supports the body. For soft and wide mattresses, the mattress is inherently designed to make people relax and fall asleep. However, the concave and convex design of car seats will produce excessive pressure on certain areas of your body while you sleep.
Especially the sunken buttocks, abnormal thigh pad design, and wing design that jams the waist, these things will put extra pressure on your entire body when you are completely asleep. These pressures will block the blood flow in parts of your body, and your brain will even subconsciously mobilize the muscles in the corresponding parts to resist these abnormal pressures in order to try to maintain the pressure balance of the entire person.
In this way, when you wake up, the blood supply to your heart accelerates, and you will obviously feel severe local muscle fatigue (because the muscles have exerted force for a long time), and the local poor blood flow will also make you feel uncomfortable. So when you step out of your car, it's natural that you feel uncomfortable. Even the abnormal design of car seats makes it impossible for some people with sensitive nerves to fall asleep at all. Therefore, sleeping in a car for a long time is by no means a pleasant thing.
Can I sleep in the car?
In fact, if you sleep in the car for a few hours, it is not a big problem. Your muscles will not be tired to that extent, because you have not entered deep sleep, and it will not have a big impact on other places. In fact, sleeping in the car is not comfortable, but it is still possible when necessary. If you don't want to waste oil by running the engine, you must choose a cool place out of direct sunlight and make sure it is safe (must be outdoors). If you sleep with the air conditioner on, just make sure it's outdoors without direct sunlight.
Finally, please remember that it is best not to sleep in relatively closed places such as underground garages, as this can easily lead to carbon monoxide poisoning.
