What Happens When You Don’t Sleep for Days

All-night study sessions, important business deals, new babies — most people will experience a taste of sleep deprivation at some point in life. While an occasional lack of sleep may not seem like a big deal, its impact can be intense and its effects can linger. And if you make it a habit, not sleeping enough can have severe consequences on your health.

“As a society, as families and individuals, we have not yet fully appreciated the importance of sleep,” says Terry Cralle, RN, a certified clinical sleep educator based in Fairfax, Virginia. “Sleep, along with diet and exercise, constitutes the very foundation of good health.”

They’re so interconnected that each of them needs to be a priority, she adds.

Chronic poor sleep puts us at increased risk of serious medical conditions, such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. During sleep, the body secretes hormones that help control appetite, metabolism, and glucose processing. Poor sleep can lead to an increase in the body’s production of cortisol, also known as the stress hormone. In addition, skimping on sleep seems to throw other hormones out of whack. Less insulin is released after you eat, and that, along with the increased cortisol, may lead to too much glucose in the bloodstream and thus an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

Everyone is different, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adults should get between seven and nine hours of sleep each night. And contrary to popular belief, sleeping an extra hour or two on the weekends cannot make up for the lost sleep you may have experienced over the course of a busy week. It could also throw off your internal body clock and possibly lead to insomnia on Sunday night. Sticking to a consistent sleep schedule is the best way to regulate the body’s clock.

Here’s what happens to the body when you miss out on shut-eye.

At 24 Hours: Impaired Coordination, Memory, and Judgment

After 24 hours of no sleep, stress hormones — specifically cortisol and adrenaline — increase to compensate for the fatigue we’re battling and to help us keep functioning, explains John Cline, PhD, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Yale School of Medicine and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

“The brain is trying to cope with not having its opportunity to rejuvenate itself, so we have these heightened stress hormones to keep the body activated,” Dr. Cline says.

The consequences of sleep deprivation at 24 hours are comparable to the cognitive impairment of someone with a blood alcohol content of 0.1 percent, according to past research. You have a reduced reaction time, slurred speech, and slowed thinking, says the Cleveland Clinic. (For reference, in most states, the alcohol limit to legally drive is 0.08 percent.)

That level of cognitive impairment could be enough to spell danger, depending on what you’re doing.

Cline points to research that suggests people have an increased risk of car accidents after working an overnight shift, because of drowsiness.

In a small study published in the Journal of Sleep Research in 2016, 29 healthy young men were kept awake for 24 hours, and it was found that the lack of sleep made them more likely to recall false memories.

“Judgment is affected, memory is impaired, and there’s deterioration in decision-making ability and eye-hand coordination,” Cralle says. You also tend to be more emotionally reactive, attention is decreased, hearing is impaired, and there is an increase in your risk of death from a fatal accident, she says.

At 36 Hours: Physical Health Starts to Be Negatively Impacted

Now your health begins to be at risk. High levels of inflammatory markers are in the bloodstream, which can eventually lead to cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure, Cralle explains. During a typical healthy night of sleep, blood pressure drops by around 10 to 20 percent. (According to Mayo Clinic, blood pressure dropping less than 10 percent overnight is a sign of an irregular blood pressure pattern.) But if sleep is chronically interrupted or not happening at all, remaining at an elevated blood pressure may be a risk factor for hypertension, research suggests.

Additionally, hormones are affected — which means your emotions can be all over the place. As your body keeps pumping cortisol into your bloodstream, raising your heart rate and blood pressure to keep you alert, the continued stress can increase feelings of anxiety and mood swings, Cline says.

If you were cranky, on edge, and zombie-like before, those symptoms will likely worsen after 36 hours with no sleep, Cline says. “Everything going on at 24 hours is going to be worse at 36 hours.”

Cognitive impairment gets much more severe as well. You’ll likely feel sluggish and experience delayed reaction time, foggy memory, and an inability to concentrate, learn new information, and process social cues, says Michelle Drerup, PsyD, a psychologist and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Cleveland Clinic.

Another study, which kept 35 undergraduate students awake for 36 hours, found that the group was slow to notice changes in their environment and had a delayed response to new stimuli in their surroundings.

At 48 Hours: Microsleeps and Disorientation

Dr. Drerup says that at the 48-hour mark, you’re dealing with “extreme sleep deprivation.”

The body begins to compensate by shutting down for “microsleeps” — 3- to 15-second bursts of rest — during which your brain switches off, Drerup says. Your eyes don’t necessarily close, and you may not be consciously aware of what’s occurring, but your brain is going offline for seconds at a time.

Brain waves measured by electroencephalogram suggest that during microsleep there are both differences and similarities to the four stages of sleep, according to research.

After two days of no sleep, you can count on increased irritability, anxiety, foggy memory, and impaired thinking, says Hussam Al-Sharif, MD, a pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Some people may even encounter hallucinations — seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there. “Some people feel depressed, and some might become euphoric,” Dr. Al-Sharif adds.

Research suggests that the immune system takes a hit, too. In a study of 16 volunteers who had to forgo sleep for 72 hours, researchers found that NK cells — or natural killer cells — decreased by 37 percent after 48 hours of wakefulness. NK cells play a key role in fighting off viruses and tumor formation.

At 72 Hours: Major Cognitive Deficits and Hallucinations

Expect significant deficits in concentration, motivation, perception, and other higher mental processes after many sleepless hours, Cralle says.

A study published in Comprehensive Psychiatry studied 12 astronauts who were assigned to isolation for 72 hours or sleep deprivation for 72 hours. The group that had to stay awake for three days had increased heart rates, higher negative mood, and lower positive emotions, compared with the group that had to live in solitude for three days.

You’re going to feel pretty miserable and dysfunctional with this much sleep deprivation, Cline says. “The brain is fighting against wanting to shut down, and that’s going to create a really fragile emotional state. ”

Microsleeps also increase in length and frequency.

Cline says that this is a protective response by the body — but those fleeting moments of involuntary rest are incredibly risky, especially if you’re behind the wheel, operating heavy equipment, or responsible for make-or-break decisions at work.

This is also when the mind is ripe for hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia, Al-Sharif says.

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This Common Anxiety Symptom Makes Me Feel Like Reality’s Slipping

I thought I was losing my mind. But I was just experiencing anxiety symptoms: derealization and depersonalization.

Health and wellness touch each of us differently. This is one person’s story.

It was like the world was made of wax.

The first time I felt it, I was walking down the streets of New York City. I’d been anxious for months, having panic attacks upon waking, while teaching, while in the back of a cab.

I’d stopped taking the subway and was walking to work when suddenly the buildings around me started to shimmer like their atoms didn’t hold together. They were too bright, immaterial, and shaking like flip-book cartoons.

I didn’t feel real either.

My hand looked garish and it panicked me to clearly feel the thought, move your hand, echo cavernously inside my head — and then see my hand move. The whole process that was supposed to be automatic, instant, and unnoticeable was broken down.

It was as if I were an outside observer of my innermost processes, making me a stranger in my own body and mind. I feared I’d lose my grip on reality, which already felt tenuous and shaky because of a severe flare-up of lifelong anxiety and panic.

I felt reality melt away a week later when I was having one of the biggest panic attacks of my life.

I was on my couch, my hands frozen into claws, the EMTs poised with an oxygen mask and EpiPen above me. I felt as though I were in a dream and everything was hyper-real — colors too bright, people too close, and huge clown-like people.

My skull felt too tight and my hair hurt. I could feel myself seeing out of my own eyes and hear myself talk too loudly inside my brain.

Aside from being deeply uncomfortable and distracting, what made it even scarier was that I had no idea what it was.

I thought it was an indication of total insanity, which caused me more anxiety and panic. It was a devastating cycle.

It would be a decade before I heard the terms derealization and depersonalization.

Although one of the most common symptoms of anxiety and panic disorder, it’s one that doctors, therapists, and people with anxiety rarely talk about.

One reason doctors may be less likely to mention derealization to patients could be because, while associated with panic, it’s not completely clear what causes it. And why it happens for some people with anxiety and not others.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, about half of US adults will experience at least one depersonalization/derealization episode in their lives.

The Mayo Clinic describes the condition as, “observing yourself from outside your body” or “a sense that things around you aren’t real.”

Depersonalization distorts the self: “The sense that your body, legs, or arms appear distorted, enlarged, or shrunken, or that your head is wrapped in cotton.”

Derealization deranges the outside world, causing one to feel, “emotionally disconnected from people you care about. ” Your surroundings appear “distorted, blurry, colorless, two-dimensional, or artificial.”

However, the terms are often used interchangeably, and diagnosis and treatment are often the same.

Health Research Funding reports that stress and anxiety are the primary causes of derealization, and that women are twice as likely to experience it as men. Up to 66 percent of people who experience a trauma will have some form of derealization.

A sense of unreality came over me during times of heightened anxiety, but also randomly — while brushing my teeth with the nauseating feeling that the reflection in the mirror wasn’t me. Or eating dessert at a dinner party when suddenly my best friend’s face looked as if it were made out of clay and animated by some foreign spirit.

Waking up with it in the middle of the night was especially scary, shooting up in bed intensely disoriented, too acutely aware of my own consciousness and body.

It was one of the scariest and most tenacious symptoms of my anxiety disorder, lingering months after the acute panic attacks and phobias had eased.

When I first started seeing my therapist, I tearfully described this symptom, concerned about my sanity.

He sat in his overstuffed leather chair, completely calm. He assured me that while bizarre and scary, derealization is not dangerous — and is in fact quite common.

His physiologic explanation eased some of my fear. “Adrenaline from prolonged anxiety redirects blood from the brain to the big muscles — the quads and biceps — so that you can fight or flee. It also sends your blood into your core, so that if your extremities are cut you won’t bleed to death. With the redirection of blood from the brain, many feel a sense of light-headedness and derealization or depersonalization. It’s actually one of the most common complaints of anxiety,” he told me.

“Also, when nervous, people tend to over-breathe, which changes the composition of blood gasses, which affects how the brain works. Because anxious people can be hypervigilant of their bodies, they notice these subtle changes that others wouldn’t and interpret them as dangerous. Because this scares them, they keep hyperventilating and derealization gets worse and worse.”

Depersonalization can be its own disorder, or a symptom of depression, drug use, or psychotropic medications.

But when it occurs as a symptom of severe or prolonged stress and anxiety, experts agree that it’s not dangerous — or a sign of psychosis — like many people fear.

In fact, the quickest way to return the brain to normal functioning is to deescalate anxiety and panic, which often means meeting the dissociative feelings with calm and acceptance, a herculean task at first.

My therapist explained that adrenaline is metabolized in two to three minutes. If one can calm themselves and their fear of the derealization, the production of adrenaline will cease, the body can eliminate it, and the feeling will pass more quickly.

I’ve found that listening to soothing, familiar music, drinking water, practicing deep breathing, and listening to affirmations can help take the focus off the strange zinging awareness and bring me back into my body.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has also shown to be one of the most effective treatments for anxiety-induced depersonalization/derealization. It can help train the mind away from obsessing over the troubling state, and help you build skills and tools to redirect attention where you want it to go.

As intense and all-encompassing as it feels, derealization does abate with time.

I used to have bouts of it several times a day, every day, and it was incredibly distracting, uncomfortable, and scary.

While I was teaching, shopping, driving, or having tea with a friend, it would send a shock through me and I’d have to retreat to bed, to the phone with a friend, or another safe space to deal with the fear it aroused. But as I learned not to react with terror — as I learned to ignore derealization with the confidence that it would not catapult me into insanity — the episodes got shorter, milder, and less frequent.

I still experience unreality sometimes, but now I ignore it and it eventually fades. Sometimes within minutes. Sometimes it takes an hour.

Anxiety is a lie. It tells you you’re in mortal danger when you’re safe.

Derealization is one of anxiety’s lies that we have to see through in order to gain our freedom and comfort. When you feel it coming, speak back to it.

I am myself; the world is here; I am safe.

Gila Lyons’ work has appeared inThe New York Times, Cosmopolitan,Salon,Vox, and more. She’s at work on a memoir about seeking a natural cure for anxiety and panic disorder but falling prey to the underbelly of the alternative health movement. Links to published work can be found atwww.gilalyons.com. Connect with her onTwitter,Instagram, andLinkedIn.

What is sleep deprivation and what does it lead to

Lack of sleep often leads to health problems, and mostly people experience it due to external circumstances. But there are those who deprive themselves of sleep on purpose. Afisha Daily asked people who practice sleep deprivation why they do it, and learned from experts what lack of sleep leads to.

Lack of sleep, as a rule, leads to serious consequences: hypertension, visual impairment, memory problems. The most common causes of sleep disorders are insomnia, mental disorders, heavy employment.

Adolescents and young adults are the most affected by sleep deprivation, and for some of them staying awake is a conscious choice. Once, 17-year-old Randy Gardner deliberately did not sleep for 11 days, and his result was entered into the Guinness Book of Records. The record was later broken by Maureen Weston, who did not sleep for 18 days.

According to the statistics of the public on VKontakte about sleep deprivation, people from 16 to 25 years of age are most often intentionally not sleeping. The main causes of conscious interruption of sleep among young people are the test of their own strength, the appearance of hallucinations and the fight against depression. Marathons are held in special groups in social networks, where participants do not sleep for several days (from 3 to 9days) and along the way discuss the effects of long-term deprivation.

States of altered consciousness that occur due to sleep interruption are similar to alcohol or drug intoxication. According to some studies, long-term sleep deprivation can cause addiction, which can subsequently lead to the use of psychoactive substances.

I spend most of my time at home, I am rarely allowed to go out. I live with my mother, a younger brother who has a disability, and a semi-paralyzed grandmother with whom I share a room. I haven’t seen my father for eight years and I don’t want to see him.

At the age of 12, I was forced to go to a psychologist, but this did not save me from nervous breakdowns and rejection of my appearance – I always had complexes about my figure. I used radical weight loss methods – fasting and heavy physical activity. Even at that moment I was depressed. All this resulted in self-harm (self-harm. – Note ed. ). I hid the cuts, and then there was a check at school so that no one got drunk because of the groups of death, and my scars were noticed. The houses were screaming. They bought me a scar cream, and I started cutting my legs. In the end, I decided to try to change something on my own.

I learned about sleep deprivation from the Internet when I was looking for ways to treat depression. In the same place, I read about pleasant consequences in the form of hallucinations and expansion of consciousness. It seemed to me that this was a salvation from all problems.

I started practicing deprivation a year ago, during this time I have not slept for a long time for more than ten times. On average, during deprivation, I do not sleep for 4–6 days. I approached the first time thoroughly: I read a lot of all sorts of articles and reviews. It only lasted me four days: I felt like a sucker because I had a dip (from the phrase “fall into a dream”) – this is when you accidentally fall asleep for a long time. By the way, there is also a microsleep – when you fall asleep for a short time and do not realize it.

My record is 240 hours. Then I set myself the goal of holding out for as long as possible. On the very first night, there was white noise in my head. Already on the fourth day, glitches began: I saw a spider the size of a fist on the wall. From the fifth day, a terrible headache appeared, and then heartburn was added to this due to hunger. I also had a prickling in my heart, probably due to high blood pressure.

I was constantly haunted by hallucinations: with peripheral vision I constantly saw someone walking behind me. The worst glitch was at the end: when I looked in the mirror and saw that I had no face. In recent days, it seemed to me that if I fell asleep, I would die. Tides of hyperactive vivacity were replaced by just hellish fatigue. My eyes hurt so much that it was difficult to open them. I felt an irresistible urge to lie down. So that no one would suspect anything, I connected all my acting skills and pretended that everything was in order. I attributed the loss of strength to fatigue after school, and for a peppy look I drank tonic drinks and used cosmetics.

Long-term deprivation is like being drunk or a light trip, although I have not tried drugs. I did not notice any expansion of consciousness, but when I wake up after a long deprivation, I feel like a different person. In the process, I feel like a researcher of my own body.

Sleep deprivation has become an obsessive desire for me. Not sleeping doesn’t solve my problems, but it does make it easier to look at them. Now I take breaks: I read that if you practice often, there will be just insomnia and the feeling of high will disappear. I will definitely repeat, because now I want to learn how to make my dreams lucid.

For me, a dream is nothingness in miniature: beautiful, beautiful, but meaningless. I learned about sleep deprivation at the age of 15 from Wikipedia, and already at 16 I did not sleep for 48 hours in a row. I decided to try sleep deprivation because I wanted to get glitches and change my thinking. Later, this developed into a desire to test one’s own abilities.

At the very beginning, it was difficult to last even two days. I drank energy drinks and coffee, but it didn’t invigorate me. Willpower and a to-do list for the night are the most important, because if you do nothing and look at pictures, you will fall asleep. The main thing is not to throw narcotic stimulants into yourself – it will not end in anything good.

After two days without sleep, the concept of time disappears and you dissolve into space. The body floats, thoughts acquire an unexpected meaning, sounds become bright and rich. Hallucinations are different – as long as the imagination is enough. For example, snakes can crawl under the carpet if you stare at it for a long time. Most of all I remember my experiment with a friend: after three days without sleep, we sat down in front of the mirror and began to look into it. At first nothing happened, but then it became eerie: abstract images appeared, and in the end it seemed to me that I was in some kind of alien space, where various images rushed through me.

I tried various sleep deprivation schedules. There were 48 hours of wakefulness against 10 hours of sleep – and so on for weeks on repeat. Or total deprivation once a week. Parents never noticed anything – a classic case.

After a couple of years of total sleep deprivation, my interest in this decreased, and I came to polyphasic sleep – sleep for 3-4 hours a day and night. I practiced it until recently, but I realized that it is quite difficult to combine it with my lifestyle. Now I have enough six hours of sleep.

Experiments with sleep increased the body’s endurance, strength for various activities appeared, and anxiety disappeared. But there are other, very unpleasant moments: because of the last sleep schedule, when I was awake for twenty hours and slept for four, I started to have sleep paralysis. I remember this moment well: I woke up from a nightmare, sat on the corner of the bed for a couple of minutes, drank water, decided to lie down for a bit to move away. I closed my eyes and began to hear beautiful sounds, then bright images appeared, and I saw myself flying through them and turning into music. But suddenly, a rumble began to grow in the background, which gradually interrupted the images and music and turned into unbearable white noise, then into ultrasound. I felt like I was flying through a tunnel, objects were flying around, and the feeling of physicality and consciousness was becoming relative. I tried to break this chain, to scream, but my voice broke. I felt unbearable fear and woke up. I saw a flickering image of my room in a broken form, which in a few seconds came together like a puzzle into a familiar picture. This is much more terrible than you can describe and imagine. This is exactly what drives you crazy. Having experienced such a shock, I thought about the impact of my experiments on health, but came to the conclusion that there are much more advantages. I don’t plan to return to deprivation or polyphasic sleep in the near future, but in the future I will definitely. The main thing is time. It is very nice to have, say, 30 free hours.

Now I am trying to move away from sleep deprivation, I try to control myself, but sometimes I still break down. I took myself on weakly and went too far. I started to stay awake more than six months ago. On average, I didn’t sleep for 4 days, and once I got 7 – and this was a turning point.

After two or three days, complete emotionlessness sets in: no one bothers you, and, in fact, no one bothers you either. They ask something, and you just keep silent, because you can’t and don’t want to answer. I didn’t see much point in talking to someone about problems already in my school years: the whole class hated me, they gathered in a group and beat me. Why talk if no one will stand up for you anyway? And now there are no people who could support me.

Deprivation helps a lot if you need to deal with accumulated problems or depression. When you stop sleeping, day after day the senses become dull, emotions disappear, and it becomes easier to look at life, to find the causes of a disgusting state. There is a feeling that you can adjust your personality as you like.

When I feel bad, total deprivation begins unconsciously. I deprive myself of sleep, food and water, and everything happens automatically. If you don’t follow this, you stop feeling your body. It feels like it’s dying – this puts a lot of pressure on consciousness. There were moments when I wanted to kill myself. When you have already found answers to the questions that you asked before deprivation, but you continue to obsess over something, it turns into madness. There is an overwhelming feeling of unfulfillment. You realize that the Universe is huge, but at the same time you understand that even in it there is no place for you.

The side effects of sleep deprivation for me were mental problems. Not everyone can endure prolonged hallucinations: images of people, the feeling that someone is watching you in the dark. Due to glitches and all the experiments on myself, I got paranoid – maybe I had it before, but now I feel it more than ever.

Two times when I did not sleep for a long time, I had memory lapses. I don’t remember anything that happened then, as if I didn’t live. I tried not to pretend that something was wrong with me – everything is fine, I just can’t sleep.

The group was created in 2011 when I first learned about the phenomenon of sleep deprivation. At that time, I was tormented by insomnia, I often could not sleep for two days. The community was primarily needed to gather people with similar interests. The audience is mostly quite young – 16-25 years old.

Later, quite by accident, the idea of ​​group sleep deprivation occurred to me (participants stop sleeping at the same time and exchange impressions in the process. – Note ed. ). Once I participated together with everyone, but now there is almost no time. For participants who extend the duration of deprivation to 5-10 days, I am extremely approving. They still try.

Now the group is more like a family. New faces are good, especially if the guys are nice, but the larger the audience, the higher the degree of inadequacy.

Sleep deprivation is used as an alternative treatment for tolerant (insensitive to conventional therapy) depression and its varieties: apathy, melancholy. This method of treatment is not recognized by all orthodox psychiatrists and psychotherapists and is not the choice of classical medicine.

Feelings in the absence of sleep for 2–3 days are more reminiscent of alcohol or drug intoxication. There is a feeling of euphoria, a hypomanic (optimistic-joyful. – note ed. ) mood, a state of some muffled consciousness and disinhibition in behavior. With longer practices, hallucinations appear, disturbances in the perception of one’s body and the surrounding space. The most dangerous data experiments will be for people with chronic diseases. For example, with a tendency to glucose metabolism disorders, diabetes mellitus may develop – due to the inability to absorb glucose during sleep. With problems with metabolism, a decrease in the production of growth hormone (growth hormone. – Note ed. ) due to sleep deprivation leads to the replacement of muscle mass with fat, growth retardation and uniform physical development. This is very important in adolescence and youth, as the growth of the body continues up to 25-28 years. If there is a heredity for mental illness in the family, prolonged sleep deprivation is likely to lead to psychosis or a neurotic disorder.

The issue of prescription sleep deprivation is hardly relevant for young people. They want to live brightly and richly, they need to look for themselves and get to know the world in all its manifestations. If you prevent the passage of the stage of self-knowledge in the development of the individual, the crisis period will not be passed, and this will backfire in maturity with such problems as antagonism, self-doubt and lack of understanding of one’s place in life.

It is worth remembering that people with pre-existing mental characteristics, family problems and psychological difficulties tend to use psychoactive substances, self-harm and experiment on their bodies. It is important not to overlook the moment when a boy or girl really needs the support, knowledge and experience of adults. We can unobtrusively offer alternative ways to get adrenaline, self-knowledge and feel needed in this world.

I am inclined to consider the intentional sleep deprivation of young people primarily as an element of self-destruction associated with their internal need to escape from reality. As a result of prolonged sleep deprivation, an effect occurs that strongly resembles the effect of the use of soft drugs, namely, the perception of oneself and the outside world changes, hallucinations appear. The possible consequences of sleep deprivation are also similar to the consequences of the use of psychotropic substances – harm to physical and mental health, up to the development of psychosis. In addition, the emergence of dependence on denying oneself in a dream is also possible.

Teenagers want to change the whole world, but at the same time they understand that this is impossible. Powerlessness breeds feelings of depression and apathy. And then, realizing the insignificance of their capabilities, they find their own way to cope with the situation – to escape from real reality into a fantasy one that they create themselves. Perhaps one of the reasons for sleep deprivation is that they are so unwilling to have anything to do with this terrible world, so unwilling to depend on it, that they begin to deny even their physiological needs for sleep, and often for food.

Information can be found on the Internet that depression can be cured with sleep deprivation. For young people, this may look like a solution to their problems. However, depression is a complex mental disorder, and it should be diagnosed by specialists, and even more so only they should prescribe treatment. The consequences of self-treatment of depressive-like conditions can have unpredictable and catastrophic consequences, similar to the misuse of potent psychotropic drugs.

Parents are responsible for the mental health of children. And it is they who should be the first to notice that something is wrong with their children in order to turn to a psychologist if necessary. But it often happens that adults do not notice the changes taking place in a teenager, so he is left alone with his feeling of depression and despair. And the fact that no one sees this further aggravates his condition. Indeed, in most cases, teenage self-destructive behavior is an unconscious call for help and the hope that help will still come.

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How many people can not sleep without harm to health. What happens if you don’t sleep for 10 days

What should I do?

05/16/23

Arthur

asked in the Community

I have heard many times that if you do not sleep for several days, you can die. I’ve always wondered why? What will happen to a person if he does not sleep, for example, for ten days?

Svetlana Belitskaya

medical journalist

Author profile

It is not easy to answer the question of what will happen to a person who is completely sleep deprived. Scientists are actively studying insomnia, but with this disorder, a person still sleeps – albeit less than necessary.

Virtually everything we know about the health effects of total sleep deprivation for days comes from one experiment on rats and a few Guinness World Record-recorded cases of insomnia in which people deliberately deprived themselves of sleep in order to become famous.

It is now known that all the experimental animals deprived of sleep died, but the people who participated in the records survived and fully recovered. But if we recalculate the time of insomnia of dead rats, taking into account their lifespan, by human standards it will be two years. People in the experiments did not sleep for only a few days.

There are also rare cases of hereditary insomnia when people lose the ability to sleep. After the development of complete insomnia, people with this disorder die, but the period of lack of sleep can last for quite a long time.

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The Rat Insomnia Experiment: Total Sleep Deprivation

Sleep deprivation refers to the complete deprivation of sleep or a severe reduction in sleep time.

The experiment with rats was very cruel – now such studies are prohibited. In 1989year, experts from the University of Chicago deprived rats of sleep using a carousel device.

Sleep deprivation in rats. Complete sleep deprivation – magazine “Sleep”

Two rats were put on the device in separate cages with a common rotating disk. A reservoir of water was placed under the disk. One of the rats was studied – she was deprived of sleep. The second is the control, which could sleep.

The disc started spinning slowly each time the test rat fell asleep: the computer monitored the animal’s electroencephalogram and started the disc as soon as it tried to sleep.

When the disc was spinning, the rats were forced to walk on it to avoid falling into the water. But the control rat could sleep when the disk was not moving. The test subject did not have such an opportunity: as soon as she tried to sleep, the disk turned on.

As a result, the control rat slept 70-75% of its normal sleep time. And the experimental one – only 10-15%.

There were several such experiments. In all of them, the control rats survived, while the experimental ones died no later than 32 days later. In human terms, this is more than two years.

How much do Russians sleep

The exact cause of the death of the rats has not been established. While the animals were alive, they noted:

1. Increased appetite with a decrease in body weight.
2. Poor condition of the coat and the appearance of wounds on the legs and tail, the causes of which were not clear.
3. Decreased body temperature.

Human sleep deprivation experiments: Guinness World Records

Randy Gardner in 1964. This is the most famous insomnia test. Gardner’s record of 264 hours, i. e. 11 days without sleep, was later broken several times. But since this experiment was best documented and the condition of the subject was constantly monitored by doctors, its results still attract the attention of specialists. They are the main source of knowledge about the effects of long-term insomnia on health.

What is the limit of how long a person can stay awake – Guinness World Records

Randy Gardner was 17 years old at the time of the experiment. He didn’t sleep for 11 days, keeping up with Coca-Cola, loud music, cold showers, nightly basketball games and visits to slot machines.

A sleep researcher at Stanford University who oversaw the experiment noted that despite his insomnia, Randy always won at slot machines. However, his analytical abilities, motivation, memory, and movement control were reduced.

A doctor also present at the test described more severe symptoms. He reported that by the fourth day, Gardner was suffering from hallucinations, delusions and could not concentrate.

10 ways to unwind before bed

Randy Gardner himself recalls his condition this way: “The first two days were easy. I stayed away from the beds and tried to stand as much as I could. But on the third day in the morning I was very sick. And then I came across citrus fruits. It turned out that tangerines or oranges relieve nausea. On the fourth or fifth day it got even worse. It was crazy when you can’t remember anything. It’s like early Alzheimer’s disease caused by lack of sleep. It’s good that Dr. Dement rented a convertible and we drove it. It really helped me: it was something new that kept me going.”

Randy Gardner and Dr. Dement of Stanford during the 1964 experiment. Photo: Don Cravens/Contributor/Getty Images

After the test, Gardner was taken to a naval hospital, where electrodes were attached to his head to study the electrical activity of the brain during sleep. After 14 hours, Randy woke up feeling only a little sleepy. “I immediately returned to my normal routine. Everything was great,” says Gardner.

However, several decades after the end of the experiment, he developed severe insomnia: “I stopped sleeping. I could not sleep. I lay in bed for five or six hours, slept for fifteen minutes and woke up again.”

I’ve always had extremely light sleep, but I’ve learned to get enough sleep

Randy Gardner’s sleep returned after ten years of torment, but not more than six hours a day.

It is not known whether Gardner’s years of insomnia was related to his youthful experiment. But he himself calls what happened a karmic retribution.

Other insomnia tests for Guinness World Records. Long-term insomnia experiments were done before Randy Gardner. The most famous was case 1959 years with Peter Tripp.

Unlike Gardner, who used only Coke and cold showers as stimulants, Tripp took stimulant drugs. As a result, his mental state was very bad, as he:

1. Doubted his identity.
2. I saw mice and kittens scurrying back and forth.
3. He accused the doctors of trying to poison him and put him in prison.

In the end, he completely refused to cooperate with specialists, and they determined his condition as psychosis.

After 201 hours – 8 days and 9 hours – the experiment was stopped and Tripp was finally able to sleep. Sleep helped: Peter fully recovered and returned to normal life.

Why is it so difficult to return to normal sleep

Peter Tripp’s extremely difficult mental state was first attributed to insomnia. But after other experiments without the use of psychostimulants, the experts decided that the psychosis was caused by a combination of lack of sleep and drugs.

After Gardner and Tripp, experiments with long-term sleep deprivation of a person were carried out many more times:

1. In 1964 Jim Thomas of California went 266 hours without sleep – 11 days and 2 hours.
2. In 1969, Bertha Van der Merwe of South Africa was awake for 282 hours 55 minutes – 11 days 18 hours and 55 minutes.
3. In 1974, Californian Roger Guy English gave up sleep for 288 hours – 12 days.
4. In 1975 Maureen Weston from Great Britain went 449 hours without sleep – 18 days and 17 hours.
5. In 1986, Robert McDonald of the USA went 453 hours 40 minutes without sleep – 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes.

No more sleep-waiver experiments. And in 1997, the Guinness Book of Records refused to register new achievements: tests of insomnia were considered too dangerous.

In addition, the experts were concerned about the possible unreliability of the results. When experiments with insomnia began to be carried out in the 1950s, scientists did not know about the existence of the microsleep effect – episodes of sleep lasting up to 15 seconds. With microsleep, a person briefly closes their eyes and loses attention. But some episodes of sleep can be with open eyes.

In the 1990s, the phenomenon of microsleep became known and people learned how to fix it. It is possible to understand that a person sleeps with his eyes open by monitoring the activity of his brain: the waves on the electroencephalogram slow down. Pupils dilate, eyes move more slowly.

Losing the battle to stay awake – Mapping the Human Brain

Functional magnetic resonance imaging shows that during microsleep, most of the brain that is deactivated during normal sleep remains active, but works a little differently. For example, a person loses the ability to distinguish sounds of different pitches.

Automatic detection of microsleep episodes using machine learning – Sleep log

Microsleep episodes at the border between wakefulness and sleep – Sleep log

The changes that occur are usually not recognized as a dream. It seems to a person that he simply stopped paying attention to what is happening around him.

As a result of studying microsleep, sleep experts began to say that there is no multi-day insomnia in principle – a person still falls asleep for a few seconds, although he does not realize it.

Physical and mental effects of sleep deprivation

What we know about a sleep-deprived person’s well-being comes from the records of doctors who tracked Randy Gardner’s condition during the 11 days of his trial. Here’s what they recorded.

A day without sleep. Fatigue, drowsiness, difficulty concentrating, irritability. All those unpleasant sensations that are familiar to every adult who at least once in his life celebrated the New Year until the morning or prepared for the exam all night long.

6 things for healthy sleep

2 days without sleep. Difficulties with focusing the eyes and signs of astereognosis, that is, difficulties with recognizing objects only by touch.

3 days without sleep. Capriciousness, slight ataxia, that is, impaired coordination of movements, inability to repeat simple tongue twisters.

4 days without sleep. Irritability and temporary non-cooperation, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating. First hallucinations. Gardner thought the road sign was a person.

5 days without sleep. Various hallucinations.

6 days without sleep. Slowing down of speech and difficulty in naming common objects.

7-8 days without sleep. Irritability, slurred speech and increased memory loss.

9 days without sleep. Episodes of fragmented thinking, in particular the inability to complete the sentence started.

10 days without sleep. Paranoia. So, Gardner focused on the radio host, who, in his opinion, was trying to make him look like a fool.

11 days without sleep. Complete absence of emotions, slurred speech, devoid of intonation. Inability to concentrate, decreased mental abilities.

Physical effects: increased appetite, decreased body temperature, trembling, vision problems, headache, increased sensitivity to pain.

Psychological symptoms: irritability and aggression, perceptual disturbances, poor concentration, loss of emotional control, drowsiness and apathy, disorientation in time and space, paranoia, delirium.

How long can a person live without sleep

Unknown. The last result recorded in the Guinness Book of Records is about 19 days. But, most likely, during this time, the subject had episodes of microsleep, which were not tracked, since they did not use special equipment.

Dr. Dement, who accompanied Randy Gardner during his famous experiment, later admitted that Gardner apparently had episodes of microsleep that had not yet been addressed at the time.

The medical literature describes cases of fatal insomnia, an extremely rare genetic disease in which a person loses the ability to sleep.

Fatal Insomnia – Sleep Foundation

Fatal insomnia is not a common sleep disorder experienced by almost every adult. It is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is manifested by motor and cognitive impairment.