Physically cannot stay awake during class/meetings

Hi all… I dunno if this is the right subreddit to post to for this stuff but I’ve had this annoying issue since I was 16.

It doesn’t matter how many hours of sleep, how much caffeine is in my body, or how energetic I feel — if one person is talking at me for a long period of time, I can NOT stay awake no matter how hard I try. This isn’t an issue unique to classes and meetings (where, embarrassingly, this happens quite frequently) — one time I was driving with my friend and he put an audiobook on which subsequently made me fall asleep at the wheel (we were stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic so he was able to shake me awake before something bad happened). I also have to change voices in my head while reading books, otherwise I’ll be out cold.

Of course, an easy solution to this is to stand up/take walks during class and meetings, but I go to a very small college and work at a very small company so standing and/or taking frequent strolls would be incredibly disruptive. My solution in school is to just sit next to my friend and tell them to kick me in the shin if I start to doze off, but I can’t really do that at work.

I just started at a new company that made it clear that they WILL fire me if I doze off at a meeting. Every time I bring up my issue to my parents, they get incredibly angry and tell me to just stay awake… which, you know, isn’t really helpful. Does anybody have a solution to this? Is this some medical problem that I can get a doctor’s note for since it happens even when I have all the energy in the world? Any help would be appreciated.