How Long Can You Go Without Sleep? In this modern society, people like to work at night. They even don’t take care of their health that is damaged due to being awake at night. So, People usually do these activities at night, such as traveling, studying, night shift working, and many others. These living conditions seriously affect their sleeping quality.
Those people who don’t sleep at night might cause insomnia, anxiety, depression, and other chronic health diseases. And those people who have insomnia don’t rest even if they want to sleep.
But the question is that, What can we do? All people need to sleep to survive and be ready to manage their work correctly Because sleep allows the body to restore itself and perform its biological tasks. For an older adult, they need 7 to 8 hours for sleeping but prevailing lifestyle doesn’t give them enough time to sleep.
Also Read: How to Create the Optimal Sleep Sanctuary in 4 Steps
Sleep deprivation is a common factor that seems more often than it does for others. We can try to sleep early; we can try to relax our mind and body. They can talk to our doctors about sleeping doses. So, But yet we can find ourselves in that situation called less res or newborn baby sleep.
Here, we should make our sleep schedule and provide our body with a peaceful environment, comfortable bed, dim lights, and silence.
Therefore, In the modern lifestyle, people usually awake at night for many reasons, just as studying, late-night working shifts, jetlag, chronic health conditions, etc. Late-night awaking may be harmful to their physical and mental health. We don’t like to work in the daytime although everybody knows that day is made for work and night is made for sleep.
Also Read: Tips To Get Better Sleep
People usually do various tricks to stay awake, just as walk, face wash, eat something, keep their space cool, chatting with friends, and many other things. People like to travel at nighttime. Those who do have work at night get more calories, while on the other side, good sleepers get fewer calories?
In 1964, Randy Gardner tested his mind and body about sleeping and waking time than his waking time, most probably 264.4 hours in 16 days without any sleep and napping. It’s a tricky question, How long can you survive without sleep?
Gardner’s experimental result of 264 hours, about 11 days, he mentioned in his experiment after 8 to 10 days, people face severe medical conditions, psychological, neurological, and psychiatric problems. While on the other side, all these show progressive and significant thoughts, perception, motivation, and other higher mental processes during rest deprivation. Although, these experiments projects recovered within just 2 or 3 days of sleep.
After waking up for 2 to 3 days without sleep, you may suffer hallucinating doze deprivation.
- Insomnia
- Sleep disorder
- Delusions
- Cognitive Impairments
- Paranoia
- Irritability
- Psychosis
- Memory Lapse
- Mood Swings and getting Angry
- Physical Pain
Although you can die from sleep deprivation, these cases are rare. Those people will die that have chronic health conditions, and they can’t live without the rest.
According to CDCP (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), having alcohol at 0.10 percent is the same as 24 hours sleep deprivation. Scientists say that 24 hours sleep deprivation has no more prolonged side effects. If you have only experienced that these side effects, such as your judgment is lag. You don’t notice your thoughts and even feel challenging to maintain a single line. Your behavior, thoughts, judgment, decision-making are affected to stay for 24 hours without sleep.
Some other physical effects are when you stay awake for 24 hours without sleeping. Let’s have a look:
- Irritability
- Drowsiness
- Poor Decision making
- Headache
- Risk of accidents
- Mood Swings
- Anger easily
- Blown Eyes
- Brain haze
- Dark Circle
One and a half-day of staying awake without any sleep cause harm to human health. If you can stay awake for 36 hours, your memory completely lapses, and you don’t even know what you did during these hours. You can face many physical health problems if you are not sleeping for one and a half days, just as high blood pressure, hormone irregularities, and cardiovascular disease.
Your sleep-wake cycle helps to overcome specific insulin, cortisol, and human cancer hormone. That the result of awaking without any rest, many bodily functions appear, such as:
- Cravings
- Stress levels increase
- Temperature
- Metabolism
- Memory lapses
- Weakness
- Motivation levels decrease
- Speech impairments
- Affected Decision-making power
- Tiredness
The 48 hours of staying awake without having any rest are quite complex; many people can’t awake for more than 36 hours. Staying awake continuously for 48 hours can also disturb your immune system. Microsleeps may be for 30 seconds and not more than one minute. Microsleeps are just a sleeplike state, and you can feel confused after microsleeps. People usually lose their conscious level in microsleeps and forget about what has happened during 48 hours.
If you were awaked continuously for 72 hours, you would notice that your heartbeat doesn’t work normally, as it beat abnormally. You will also notice your mood and emotions are changed. And you will feel that your anxiety and depression are increased.
In short, you will see many significant problems if you are not sleeping for many days. You might be experiencing that illusions and hallucinations. Illusion is a misinterpretation that is happening. A simple example of illusion, you are seeing a person and thinking that it’s a sign. On the other hand, Hallucination is when you know a person, and that is not there.