This Is How Long You Can Actually Go Without Sleep
Swear you haven't slept for soooo long? Theoretically, the body can go without sleep for a while—the world record being 11 days and 25 minutes...maybe (more on that in a minute). But that absolutely doesn't mean that there are benefits to going without sleep. In fact, impairments to your body and performance start when you skimp on sleep by an hour a night, and they build up from there (check out the whole catalog of things that happen to your body in the various stages of sleep deprivation).
Let's look at that sleep deprivation record for a moment: In 1963, Randy Gardner and a friend decided to do an experiment for the science fair to see how long one of them could stay awake. History suggests he ended up being awake for 264 hours. But according to W. Christopher Winter, MD, MH advisor and author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It, there's reason to be skeptical about this record: "Investigators freely admit he was having near constant 'microsleeps' [brief periods of sleep that last just a few seconds] during the experiment," he says.
Even if someone does manage to stay up for days at a time, it's not great for your physical or mental health. In 1959, for instance, a radio presenter named Peter Tripp decided to broadcast his show from the middle of Times Square for 201 hours straight to raise money for a children's foundation. By day three, Tripp had begun acting out, cursing at people around him, and hallucinating spiders. Although he managed to finish the experiment and recover shortly after, his family members said he was never quite the same again. Gardner, on the other hand, says he went to bed and slept for 14 hours after his experiment and plugged right back into life as usual.
There have been many viral internet stories about people who claim they're not sleeping at all or who only get an hour of sleep per night. But Dr. Winter says these stories are probably inaccurate. "Many people think that they are not sleeping, and do not believe their doctors (or their Fitbits) who say they are," says Dr. Winter. In other words, although people may believe they're only getting an hour or so of sleep per night, the truth is that they're likely sleeping without knowing it, even if just for a few minutes.
The truth is, it's almost physically impossible to stay awake for days at a time, because your brain will essentially force you to fall asleep. Dr. Winter says that as much as you may try to force yourself to stay awake, eventually your brain gets fixated on sleep and "at a certain point there's not much you can do about it."
That's a good thing—you really don't want to go without sleep. In fact, breaking the sleep deprivation record is such a not-great idea that apparently Guinness World Records has stopped documenting attempts at this in an effort to prevent people from damaging their health.
But if you think you're knocking on the door of this record due to coronasomnia or other things that are keeping you tossing and turning, it might be useful to do a reality check. Use a wearable or an app (there are some that measure your sleep through your smartphone, no wearable needed) to verify how much you're sleeping or not. You might find that you're getting more shut-eye than you think. That helps decrease anxiety about how much sleep you're getting. But to actually increase the amount of sleep that you're getting, use Dr. Winter's best get-more-sleep tips.
So while there is no set number of hours for how long a person can stay awake, this experiment is probably not worth trying, says Dr. Winter. "My record was 48 hours and I was hallucinating the sound of my mom whispering to me by the end," he says. "Not fun!"
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