“For a while, we can struggle with sleep, but at some point, the lack of sleep will begin to lead to temporary clouding of the mind and, possibly, even death,” says Adam Hadhezi.
It's amazing what we spend our lives on. For our 78th birthday, we spend nine years watching TV, four years driving a car, 92 days in the toilet, and 48 days of having sex.
But when it comes to time-consuming activities, there is one that prevails over all others. When we reach 78 years old, we will spend almost 25 years just sleeping. In an effort to save some of this time, it is quite reasonable to ask: how long can we be awake and what are the consequences of a long lack of sleep?
Any healthy person who decides to find out through personal experiment will find it very difficult. "The need for sleep is so strong that it will replace even the need for food," says Erin Hanlon, assistant professor at the Center for Sleep, Metabolism and Health at the University of Chicago. "Your brain will simply fall asleep, despite all conscious efforts to prevent it from doing so."
Why sleep at all?
Why the need for sleep is so strong remains a mystery. “The exact functions of sleep are still not fully understood,” says Hanlon. And he adds that there is something in a dream that seems to "reboot" the systems of our body. What's more, research has shown that regular long-term sleep promotes wound healing, immune system function, proper metabolism, and more, which makes a person feel good after a sound sleep.
On the other hand, lack of sleep increases the risk of diabetes, heart problems, obesity, depression, and other illnesses. To avoid this, the body gives us signals when we sit up at work until late at night: we feel tired, unsteady on our feet, eyelids become heavy and eyes begin to hurt. As we continue to struggle with sleep, our ability to focus and form short-term memories diminishes.
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If we ignore all these side effects and stay awake for several days in a row, we will go crazy. We become moody, overly suspicious and see things that are not really there. "People start to hallucinate and go crazy," says Atul Malhotra, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at the University of California, San Diego.
Truckers call this condition "seeing a black dog." If a dark spot appears on the road ahead, it is time to stop the truck.
Many studies confirm that with a prolonged lack of sleep in the body, many vital processes are disrupted: the blood levels of stress hormones - adrenaline and cortisol - rise, resulting in increased blood pressure; heart rhythms are thrown off and the immune system malfunctioning. Sleep deprived people are constantly anxious and more susceptible to various diseases.
However, all the negative consequences of insomnia or several night vigils are fickle and disappear after a sound sleep. "If there are any consequences, they are reversible," says Jerome Siegel, professor at the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California, Los Angeles.
What if the dream still does not come?
But what if the dream doesn't come? A rare genetic disorder called Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), or Fatal Insomnia, is one of the clearest examples of the effects of prolonged wakefulness.
A total of 40 families around the world have this disease in the gene pool. One defective gene causes proteins in the nervous system to fold into prions, causing them to lose all their properties.
"Prions are abnormally shaped proteins that harm the health of these people," says Malhotra. "The accumulation of prions in the nervous tissue destroys it and creates holes in the brain (this is what happens in the most famous disorder caused by prions, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease)." Especially in people with fatal insomnia, the thalamus, the region of the brain responsible for sleep, is affected. Because of this, debilitating insomnia appears.
After getting fatal insomnia, a person suddenly begins to spend 24 hours without sleep and develops strange symptoms such as diminished pupils and increased sweating. After a few weeks, the victim of the disease falls into a kind of "twilight before bedtime." It seems that he suffers from sleepwalking, and his muscles are relaxed and involuntary, as sometimes happens in sleeping people. Weight loss and craziness follow. And ultimately, death.
However, sleep deprivation in itself is not considered a lethal agent. The point is that fatal insomnia leads to extensive brain damage. "I don't think sleep loss kills these people," Siegel says, "after all, the frequent sleep deprivation torture of inmates has not been known to kill anyone, although it does cause terrible suffering."
Sleep deprivation experiments in animals have provided even more evidence that sleep deprivation is not fatal in itself, but may well be a contributing factor.
In a study conducted in the 1980s by Allan Rechtschaffen at the University of Chicago, rats were placed on discs placed above trays of water. Whenever the rat tried to doze off, as shown by the results of measurements of brain waves, the disk rotated, and the septum pushed the rat towards the water, causing it to wake up.
All rats died after about a month, albeit for unclear reasons. “Most likely, the reason was the frequent stress of waking up, exhausting their bodies. On average, they woke up a thousand times a day,”says Siegel. Among other symptoms, the rats developed abnormal body temperature and weight loss despite increased appetite.
“The problem lies in the interpretation of human and animal sleep studies: you cannot completely deprive a person or an animal of sleep without their cooperation, without putting them under enormous stress,” says Siegel. “If death occurs, it is still a question of whether it is the result of stress or lack of sleep? It’s not easy to understand.”
Wake up! Wake up
All of this can stop most people from testing their limits, but the question is, "How long can we stay awake?" - remains unanswered. The most widely known record for voluntary sleep cessation is held by Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old high school student from San Diego, California, which he set in 1964 for a science exhibit project. Gardner had been awake for 264 straight hours, or just over 11 days, according to scientists who watched him continuously. There are many other less reliable information. For example, a British woman won a rocking chair rocking competition in 1977. Her record is 18 days.
It is generally unclear how long a person can stay awake, but it may be a good thing. Realizing the risk that people can put themselves, giving up sleep for the sake of a new record, about 10 years ago, the Guinness Book of Records stopped tracking such achievements.