Prolonged insomnia can have serious consequences for your health.
For most of us, sleep is incredibly important. A long-term lack of sleep can lead to severe consequences for the body.
11 days and 25 minutes. This is the Guinness World Record for the longest time a person can stay awake, held by Randy Gardner, who was 17 years old at the time, since 1963.
When someone starts to experience 24 hours without sleep, they will inevitably fall into a state of “grogginess”. (Image source: Fitbit).
To this day, no one has been able to break this record, as Guinness World Records actually removed it from their categories in 1997 due to the inherent dangers associated with sleep deprivation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sleep is crucial for maintaining the functions of organs and internal systems, as well as for the body’s emotional regulation.
A lack of sleep can increase the risk of several health conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression.
Experts indicate that a healthy individual needs to sleep between 6 to 8 hours within any 24-hour period. Thus, it is possible to arrange multiple short naps or one long sleep, as long as it falls within the permissible time frame.
Dr. Oren Cohen from the CDC notes that when someone begins to experience 24 hours without sleep, they will always fall into a state of “grogginess.” This is when the brain shows signs that they are on the edge between sleeping and waking, even experiencing hallucinations, although they may appear very alert.
Dr. Cohen also affirms that prolonged sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on the body, even for healthy individuals, to the extent that studying it in people is considered unethical. In the past, it was even used as a form of psychological torture.
For individuals with a rare genetic disease that causes prolonged insomnia, known as Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), their bodies gradually weaken and eventually die due to abnormal protein accumulation, which damages brain cells. On average, these unfortunate individuals only live about 18 months after the onset of the disease.
In animals, a study from 1989 on rats showed that these creatures could only survive without sleep for about 11 to 32 days before dying.
A study conducted on humans in 2019 found that after being awake for about 16 hours, participants no longer maintained alertness, and their senses significantly declined. At this point, participants continuously lost focus on events, with some even experiencing hallucinations.
Another study from 2000 found that staying awake for 24 hours reduced hand-eye coordination equivalent to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%.
You cannot “make up” for lost sleep the next day or over the weekend.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the effects of sleep deprivation after 24 hours include slower reaction times, slurred speech, impaired decision-making, decreased memory, concentration, vision, and auditory-hand-eye coordination.
If one reaches 36 hours without sleep, they may experience increased signs of inflammation in the blood, potentially causing hormonal imbalances and slowing metabolic processes.
Very few people can stay awake for 72 hours, as the body starts to become anxious, depressed, hallucinate, and struggle with basic functions.
A study published in 2021 in the journal Medical Education also emphasized that you cannot “make up” for lost sleep the next day or over the weekend.
Instead, sleep deprivation accumulates over time. Therefore, those who are sleep-deprived must bear a kind of “debt,” tentatively termed “sleep debt.” Research indicates that for every hour of lost sleep, an individual needs to sleep an additional 8 hours to recover.
