Randy Gardner set the record when, at the age of 17, he slept the longest, staying awake for 11 days and 25 minutes, during a school project in California in 1963.
Other people are reported to have broken this record: Robert McDonald went 18 days and almost 22 hours without sleep in 1986, but none of them were under such close supervision or under the care of a doctor like Gardner.
The Guinness Book of Records no longer includes this work. In 1997, they stopped accepting new applications due to the “inherent dangers associated with sleep deprivation”.
What are these dangers? What happens to people who suffer from prolonged sleep deprivation?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sleep is essential for executive, emotional, and physical functions, and sleep deprivation can increase the risk of many diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression.
Experts say that people need to consistently get six to eight hours of sleep in the same 24-hour period.
But it is not uncommon for some, especially students, to stay up all night or even 24 hours.
At this stage of sleep deprivation, it can be difficult to tell sleep from being awake, says Dr. Oren Cohen, a research assistant at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Cohen said that when someone approaches 24 hours without sleep, their brain activity already shows signs that they are on the verge of falling asleep and waking up, even if they appear to be awake.
This is called sleep disturbance or partial sleep.
“People who miss hours of sleep seem to be awake, but their brains involuntarily fall into abnormal sleep, which may include periods of inattention or hallucinations. But sleep takes over and the brain inevitably falls asleep. And when someone tells me they haven’t slept weeks, it’s almost impossible.”
Cohen noted that it can be difficult to accurately determine how long people can go without sleep and the timing of side effects.
Avedon reported that chronic sleep deprivation, where a person stays awake for long periods, is so damaging that it would be unethical to investigate it in humans. It has even been used as a form of psychological torture.
While long-term sleep deprivation cannot be studied, we do have data on people with a rare genetic disorder called fatal familial insomnia (FFI). These patients have a genetic mutation that causes the accumulation of an abnormal protein in the brain and gradually impairs sleep.
Their bodies begin to deteriorate and eventually they die because the abnormal protein builds up and damages the brain cells. The disorder kills most patients within an average of 18 months.
A 1989 study on rats showed that animals can only go 11 to 32 days without sleep before it kills them.
And found a 2019 human study published in the journal Nature and Science. of Sleep showed that participants’ wakefulness was relatively normal up to 16 hours of sleep deprivation. But after 16 hours, the rate of attention loss increased significantly and was worse in participants with chronic insomnia.
A 2000 study also found that being awake for 24 hours reduced hand-eye coordination on par with a blood alcohol content of 0.1%.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the effects of 24-hour sleep deprivation included reduced reaction time, slurred speech, impaired decision making, decreased memory and attention, irritability, impaired vision, hearing, and hand-eye coordination.
And the Cleveland Clinic reported that within 36 hours, people suffering from sleep deprivation can have an increase in inflammatory markers in the blood and even develop hormonal disorders and slow metabolism.
There is little research on what happens beyond 72 hours, but people can experience anxiety, depression, hallucinations, and problems with executive function.
Studies conducted with American doctors have shown that poor sleep increases fatigue and increases the number of medical errors, which they themselves report.
A 2021 study published in the Journal of Medical Education found “greater impulsivity, slower cognitive processing, and impaired executive function” compared to before their 26-hour shift.
Shift workers are also at high risk of the consequences of poor sleep because they tend to be sleep deprived, cannot always fall asleep at the same time, and are often forced to fall asleep with the lights on, which interferes with normal human sleep-wake patterns. cycle.
It’s important to know that you can’t make up for lack of sleep the next day or weekend.
Sleep deprivation is cumulative, so those who don’t get enough sleep experience a kind of sleep deprivation. According to Avedon, for every hour of sleep lost, it takes a whopping eight hours of sleep to recover.
Source: Living Science
