How Long Can a Human Stay Awake?

From the whole daylight/darkness bit in Alaska, I sometimes can't sleep for days, then crash hard for about 2 whole days... It's rare now.

However, there is a medical condition, where people can't sleep for years (can't recall the exact name, it was a Trivial Pursuit question the other day...)

Originally posted by DeusEx

Does anyoen else have troubel gettign to sleep after staying up awhile?

DE

i have to stay up all night a few times a month to finish projects for work. When daylight comes im completely drained of energy and ready to crash, but when i get in bed it is very hard for me go to sleep. Its like my brain cant settle down from being used so much for such a long time, and thoughts just keep running through my mind but i cant concentrate on them.

You trip from lack of sleep way worse if you use pills(ex. stay alert caffeine) to keep you up. But doing this way can also lead to heart fatigue

The catch is to do your sleeping as dolphins do, one brain hemisphere at a time. Both eyes remain open but one half of the brain is sleeping at a time. For all intensive purposes you are both awake and sleeping at the same times, achieving the refreshment of REM the dreaming state, and other areas of sleep.

Tonight at 9:30 PM, 23/mar/2004, TechTV is airing a show that investigates the physical and mental effects due to sleep deprivation. TechTV Body Hits

Originally posted by chrisnolefan

Originally posted by DeusEx

Does anyoen else have troubel gettign to sleep after staying up awhile?

DE

i have to stay up all night a few times a month to finish projects for work. When daylight comes im completely drained of energy and ready to crash, but when i get in bed it is very hard for me go to sleep. Its like my brain cant settle down from being used so much for such a long time, and thoughts just keep running through my mind but i cant concentrate on them.

Sometimes if I stay up too long, it's almost as if I don't want to go to sleep. Also, there will be times when my eye-lids feel like Bricks, and my eyes Hurt, but my mind is still racing and I just can't fall asleep.

Ive heard that you start halucinating after about 3 days without sleep, yet, when faced with traumatic experiences, it seems that we can actually go without sleep.
I dont know if this is true or not, but a t.v. program had this one guy, who was in a car crash (or something of the likes), had a whole bunch ofbrain surgery, and later he found he couldnt sleep. Apparently now he meditates, trying to mock a state of sleep.

In SEAL training, during Hell Week, students are forced to excersise continuously for 5 and 1/2 days straight, with no sleep. After the 3rd night, students are no longer responsible for their actions, and are classified "legally insane".

Mr. M

When I stay up all night, I don't feel tired in the morning. The tiredness goes away.

reply to post by lilblam


That wonen must be messed up becouse after a certain amount of time your body needs REM sleep. Its the deepest sleep were it dose cell repair and things like that on your body. If you dont do this your body will simply crash your system, weather you want to sleep or not. It needs it to survive and to develope cells, and also to do thousands of other things. So i really think this woman awake for 8 years is a huge hoax. simply impossable. And this is not not talking, its prooven science. If she dose exist she is suffering from sever illness and will not develope anymore, and will die.

Three days total, the bodies motor functions start to stop.

Two days if the body is malnourished.

Lmao.. Ima go 3 days straight of no sleep... I want to see these hallucinations..

reply to post by Thugg1n


You would be surprised how much you might see with your new perception, try this instead, go two hours a day of sleep for a year and mix it up with none one day at all then three, make your body guess your routine and look at the world around you.

I bet you will learn to consume energy on only what is needed.

The longest I was able to stay awake was 121 hours. I had a one hour nap at work but that was about it. worked at the airport and we were all being laid off, and i was the only one that stayed on to the very end. the effects of being awake that long were very weird. I would go from the luggage garage to the plane without any recollection of the journey in between and would drive the tug, ugly little truck that pulled the baggage carts, all over but had no idea i did it. I think that I either slipped in and out of consciousness or suffered from amnesia, it was a pretty scary thing. it is definitely a bad situation to get yourself into. I suggest ambian for anybody that has had a problem with insomnia. i had it for about 3 years awake 2-3 days then sleep 2 hours and go back through the cycle. the ambian put on a regular cycle of sleep and i only needed to take it for 3 months. they didnt have the ambian cr when i took it so i dont know if it will work as well as the original. but be careful you dont take to much, otherwise you hallucinate really bad and have no memory of it. i have a high tolerance to medications and i was only supposed to tak one pill for my weight but i had to take 1 1/2 for it to work. i took 2 pills one time and according to my brother i was crawling on the floor screaming that gremlins were attacking me! best sleep I ever got though! anyways i rambled on a bit, sorry, now quit reading this and go get some sleep!

72 hours was my best / worst... it was back in the more young days, where me and the mates were preoccupied with computer games and so on. We would have lan parties and stock heavily up on cokes and candy.
Somewhere around 48 hours you stop caring... mind almost goes on autopilot. Everything seems more funny, you try to trip eachother out, was a blast. In the end we just got sick... you know, intense dizzyness, absence of mind, incoherent talk and unable to listen to what others say. Thankfully we picked up on that queue and went to sleep for 14 hours :O

I hated myself after that trip, and so did my body.

reply to post by lilblam


I don't believe that... Fatal familial insomnia is a rare type of insomnia where the subject slowly loses the ability to sleep. It's not curable, and everyone who gets it dies in a screwed up way. When the brain is no longer able to enter sleeping stages, such as rem and nrem, it can't rest and reboot... Think of it as the same thing that would happen if a bodybuilder would start training and never stop, his body would break down. Hallucinations, delirium... It's a common thing for these poor chaps... And they all eventually die, when their brain crashes...

So I don't think that she is telling the complete truth here

alright, ive just started my experiment to stay up as long as i can, i have 70 cans of red bull and £30 to spend on sugary sweets, my record is only 3 days because i have no motive, no reoson to stay awake and nothing to focus on, i play a lot of online games but i have nowhere to sut apart from on my bed which isnt a good idea, now im only 17 and i want advise on how to stay awake dont lecture me on health.

so how long do you think i can do it for, ive not had sleep for 19 hours which is not bad im not at all tired

Its noted you can die from the lack of sleep.Your muscles arent getting rested and the body functioning nonstop could lead to atrophy.Meaning your body feeds from the muscle and not the body fat reserves..

Next time you say "you can sleep when you're dead," you might want to rethink your statement. A study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that a lack of sleep can actually, well... kill.

Not only can chronic sleep deprivation leave you short-tempered, but it can also put a lot of unneeded stress on your heart, which in turn can raise your risk of cardiovascular disease and death.

AFP reported that the study, which was released on Wednesday, found that just five nights of poor sleep can significantly stress the heart.

39 volunteers were studied twice. Once in the beginning when each volunteer got ten hours of sleep per night, and again a second time when they only received four hours of sleep for five nights straight.

Surprisingly, all 39 volunteers were shown to have a much faster heart rate following the nights of sleep deprivation. Electrocardiograms also showed each volunteer to have less heart rate variability, or performance when under stress.

"The effect of the sleep deficit was to increase the stress on the hearts of these volunteers," said Siobhan Banks, the person behind the study.

"If our finding is sustained by a larger group and further analysis, it may suggest why short sleep duration is associated with a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality."

This isn't the first study which has found that a lack of sleep can cause health problems. Last year a similar study found that workers of second and third shift jobs are at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease.

So if a lack of sleep can kill, can extra sleep help?

At the same conference on Wednesday, researchers from Stanford University reported that extra sleep can actually help athletes play better and give everyday people an extra boost. No negative reports were given on people getting too much sleep.

The study by Stanford took six athletes from the school and found that they were able to shave seconds off sprint times and improve their shooting percentages after getting as much sleep as possible. It's almost as if there is no such thing as "too much sleep."

Study: A Lack of Sleep Can Put Stress on Heart and Can Be Fatal