How to Stay Awake During Meetings (Even the 2pm Screen-Share)

The 2pm call has 11 people on it, someone is sharing a 40-slide deck, and your eyelids feel like they weigh a kilo each. If you're looking up how to stay awake during meetings, you need two things. One is a set of habits that make the long calls bearable. The other is something that works in the 10 seconds between hearing your name and unmuting.

Why meetings knock you out after lunch

The afternoon sag is built into the body clock. Timothy Monk, writing in Clinics in Sports Medicine in 2005, described the post-lunch dip as "a real phenomenon that can occur even when the individual has had no lunch," and added that a high-carbohydrate lunch makes it worse. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center put the usual window at 2 to 4 p.m., roughly 16 to 18 hours after you went to bed the night before. That is exactly when a lot of teams book the weekly review.

Video calls add to it. Niina Nurmi of Aalto University and Satu Pakarinen of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health followed 44 knowledge workers through 382 meetings at two Finnish multinationals, with heart rate monitors on and a sleepiness scale to fill in. Their 2023 paper in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology found people reported more drowsiness in virtual meetings than in face-to-face ones, and the effect showed up most in people who weren't engaged in the discussion. The virtual meetings also ran longer, 46.4 minutes on average against 25.5 in person.

So the person most likely to nod off is the one sitting quietly on a long call after lunch, camera off. Most of what follows is about getting out of that seat, on your feet or in the conversation.

How to stay awake during meetings on video

Camera-off calls are where people drift. Some fixes that cost nothing:

• Take long screen-shares standing. Put the laptop on a shelf or a stack of books. Nobody on the call can see your legs.
• Keep a notes doc open and write one question for each agenda item. In the Nurmi and Pakarinen data, the drowsy ones were the disengaged ones, and a half-written question gives you a reason to listen.
• Close your inbox. Email in a second window keeps you passive on the call.
• Sit near daylight. In a Lighting Research Center study led by Mariana Figueiro, people given red or blue light in the mid-afternoon showed less of the brain activity linked to sleepiness than people sitting in darkness.
• Keep a glass of cold water on the desk and sip through the call. Dr. Rachel Salas, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins, gave that tip to CNN in December 2025 for people who skip caffeine.

Falling asleep in meetings held in a real room

In person you can't pace around behind the laptop, so the tactics change. Sit forward on the chair and pick a seat that faces the speaker and the window, with your back to the wall. Offer to take the notes. The person writing the minutes has a job in every minute of the meeting, and that job keeps their pen moving.

If you run the meeting, try holding the short ones standing up. Allen Bluedorn at the University of Missouri compared stand-up and sit-down meetings in a 1999 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Psychology Today reported the standing meetings were about a third shorter, with decisions just as sound.

How to stay awake in a meeting without coffee

Coffee at 3pm is a trade plenty of people regret at 11pm. Dr. Amita Sehgal of the University of Pennsylvania told CNN to keep coffee for morning meetings for that reason. For the afternoon, the CNN panel offered alternatives:

• Walk outside, briskly, for a few minutes before the call. Dr. Tony Cunningham of Harvard Medical School pointed out that light exercise gets your heart rate up.
• Rinse your face with cold water right before you go in (Sehgal's suggestion).
• If there's a gap and a quiet room, nap. Cunningham said even a 6-minute nap has been shown to raise alertness, and to keep naps under 30 minutes so you don't wake up groggier than before.

Breaks between calls count too. In March 2021, Microsoft's Human Factors Lab put EEG caps on 14 people and ran them through four half-hour video meetings. Back to back, their beta wave activity (associated with stress) kept climbing. With 10-minute breaks in between, it stayed roughly level through all four.

The moment your name gets called

Everything above takes minutes. Sometimes you have seconds. The presenter says "let's get a view from your side," and you've been looking at the same slide for 20 minutes. Dragon Breath is built for that moment.

It is a 50 ml mouth spray of chilcuague root extract (Heliopsis longipes), wild-harvested in Central Mexico. Give it one spray under the desk, or turn the camera off for a second before you unmute. Within about 10 seconds a bright, electric buzz spreads across the tongue and mouth. Then the mouth floods with saliva, and a clean, fresh feeling lingers after that. The taste is earthy and a little peppery for a second before the tingle takes over. It is hard to stay glazed over with that going on, and you come back to the call sharp enough to answer the question.

A customer filmed in a reaction video, moments after one spray, said it in two words: "Definitely energized."

A spray suits a meeting better than most things you could reach for. It lives in your pocket or the desk drawer, it makes no noise, and there's nothing to unwrap or chew on camera. A few sprays is all it takes, and one bottle holds 250+ sprays. The extract stays sealed in Miron violet glass, away from air and light, so it keeps its bite far longer than loose root or powder would. Start with one spray, and go up to five once you know the feeling.

The root is known as golden root in the Sierra Gorda of Central Mexico. There's more on where chilcuague grows and how it has been used in our main guide.

Dragon Breath – Chilcuague Extract

50 ml mouth spray. Wild-harvested chilcuague root, dual-extracted. 250+ sprays.

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How to stay alert in the afternoon when it's all calls

A day of back-to-back meetings is a different problem from a slow afternoon at your desk. For the desk version, we've written about getting through the afternoon slump. For a calendar full of calls, book 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60 so there's always a gap to stand up. If you control the schedule, move the long screen-share reviews to the morning and keep 2 to 4 p.m. for short calls where everyone talks. And keep the bottle next to your mouse for the 3:30 you can't move.

Questions people ask

Why do I get so sleepy in meetings?

Most afternoon meetings land in the post-lunch dip, usually 2 to 4 p.m. A 2023 study of 382 meetings found people felt drowsier on video calls than in person.

What can I do if I'm falling asleep in a meeting right now?

Sit forward, write down a question and ask it. If you're on video, stand up with the camera off for a moment, sip cold water, or give yourself one spray of Dragon Breath before you unmute.

Can I use Dragon Breath on a video call?

Yes. It is silent and fits in your hand, so one spray under the desk takes a couple of seconds. The buzz arrives within about 10 seconds.

How many sprays should I use before a meeting?

Start with one. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five.