Sleepless nights are a reality for many of us: parents of newborns, students cramming for tests, people struggling with insomnia. We all know that we need To sleep, but come on, can’t we go without it for a while? Sort of, but it’s not pretty.
The world record is 19 days
The most famous record holder for sleep deprivation – although he does not hold the current record – is Randy Gardner, who is widely believed to have experienced the best-documented period of extreme sleep deprivation by a human: 264 hours, or about 11 days.
As NPR reportsGardner was working on a science fair project with two other students in 1963, and they decided to beat the 260 hours of sleep accomplished by a radio DJ. Gardner loses the coin toss, and goes without sleep while the others observe him and test his wits. He was 17 years old at that time.
His experiment attracted media attention, and soon Stanford sleep researcher William Dement and Navy medic John Ross also began evaluating him. After reaching the 264-hour mark, Gardner underwent a brain scan (showing him healthy) and then slept for 14 hours.
His record has since been broken several times, most recently in 1986, with a nearly 19-day hibernation stretch by stuntman Robert MacDonald. It is the last documented world record. However, don’t try to beat it: the Guinness Book of World Records decided to stop monitoring sleep deprivation records in 1997. They recognized that publishing the record meant people would keep trying to beat it, and the effects of extreme sleep deprivation were considered so dangerous that they didn’t want to encourage it.
That said, if you want to read more about the record holders and what their experiences were like, Guinness has a rundown on its website. Of note is that Peter Tripp, a DJ who competed for records in the 1950s, experienced severe hallucinations that may have been due to the Ritalin he took to stay awake rather than a direct effect of sleep. (Some types of hallucinations can still be caused by sleep deprivation alone, he says.)
What happens when you are severely sleep deprived
Guinness site record holders frequently reported feeling nauseous and irritable. By the fourth day, a scientist observing Gardner recalled that he had “hallucinations, delusions, and an extremely short attention span.”
1974 record breaker Roger Guy English, who used no stimulants other than caffeine, experienced hallucinations that persisted even after the experiment was over. Another record breaker, Maureen Weston, experienced hallucinations when she was sleep deprived, but said she recovered fully when she was able to get some sleep.
A StatPearls Guide to Sleep Deprivation reports that chronic sleep loss (which may involve little sleep, but not enough for long periods of time) “is associated with increased mortality and morbidity, poorer performance on waking activities resulting in increased accidents and injuries, lower quality of life, reduced family well-being, and less use of health care.” They add: “It is clear that sleep loss has a profound impact on human health and well-being.”
How long can the average person go without sleep?
For practical advice, let’s turn to the military. The military needs its members to function, but often gives them assignments that make sleep difficult or impossible, so it has developed policies on the issue. A Pentagon report on sleep deprivation defines “complete sleep deprivation” as being awake for 24 hours, Or Skip your normal sleeping window, whenever that may be. In other words, if you normally wake up at 7am but stayed up all night playing video games (or getting shot by enemies), when 7am rolls around, you’re considered to be in a completely sleep-deprived state.
They also consider “partial sleep deprivation” to mean a period in which you’re getting less than seven hours of sleep each night, because your sleep periods were either shortened or interrupted. A week of this is considered “chronic partial sleep deprivation”.
What do you think so far?
According to the same report, every 24 hours of total sleep deprivation comes with an estimated “25-35% decline in cognitive function performance”. It’s not that you’ll hit a wall at certain hours and be unable to function, but that, over time, your brain starts to work less.
The report also cites findings that sleep deprivation can increase the risk of traumatic brain injury, emotional exhaustion and “role overload” (burnout), increase and worsen anxiety symptoms, increase PTSD symptoms, and increase depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts and attempts.
According to the military, the bottom line: Members should be assigned duties that allow eight hours of sleep out of every 24 hours, if possible. Where that’s not possible, plan for “banking” sleep before that sleep-deprived period, and allow time for “recovery” sleep afterwards (like how Gardner went out for 14 hours after his experiment).
What if you can’t sleep?
A clinical case of insomnia is a different situation than a student or soldier pulling an all-nighter. Insomnia can have many causes, and it’s worth getting evaluated to find out what’s going on in your body and mind that’s preventing you from getting a good night’s sleep. The advice you get will depend on exactly what is wrong.
It’s worth mentioning just because you did think you don’t sleep It doesn’t mean you really had a sleepless night. Whenever I interview a sleep specialist, they always have stories about patients who don’t sleep up and down, but catch a few z’s without realizing in a sleep study that they’ve slipped.
Even the Guinness Book recognizes this: in addition to the health risk, one of the reasons they stopped keeping sleep records is that people who seem awake can still experience “microsleep”. The CDC, in discussing the effects of long shifts on nurses, writes that “a sleep-deprived person cannot control the onset of microsleeps and often does not know they are occurring.”
Instead of looking at the clock and worrying about how much sleep you’re not getting, sleep experts recommend that you Try your best to relax. Relaxation is almost as good as sleep, and often leads to sleep. If you still have problems with daytime sleepiness, or if you have other concerns about your sleep, see a doctor.
