Am i doing any actual dammage by staying awake for very very long periods of tim!
Question: Am i doing any actual dammage by staying awake for very very long periods of time?
The longest i have gone without sleep is 10 days last summer, (you don't want to know) i have to say that i did go a bit crazy. Roughly in the middle of it, i completely lost track of time & forgot how long i had been awake for. A while after this i remembered, but i remembered wrong by 3 days, i thought that i started on a friday, but in actual fact i started on the wednesday before. It wasn't until actual day 9 that i recalculated & realised that it was actual day 9. This was a shock as i had never been awake for more than say 7 days in the past.
I decided to go shopping for food, but i found walking to be quite difficult, it wasn't that i didn't have the strength, it was the coordination, it was like my body was a deck chair that i had forgotten how to unfold, i was concentrating on my legs to walk, but it was difficult to keep the rest of my body's in a normal posture, though with practise i improved so np.
OK so obviously horrifying, but that aside, is there any actual damage or significant damage with this kind of experience, say compared to running a marathon etc. I am in excellent physical health, very active and had a resting heart rate of 43bpm when i was 23, so what about extreme endurance athletes or people in survival situations or people that have come through concentration camp type experiences with limited food & back breaking work. All of these have pushed the limits compared to say a 9-5 existence for a time. Do they drop dead no, they recover and then go back to normal.
So disregarding a number of obviously very very significant factors, just focusing on the physical, is there any problem with going without food or sleep for long periods of time, (not as your day job, and not 100 & 100s of times, just say a relatively small number of times)
I decided to go shopping for food, but i found walking to be quite difficult, it wasn't that i didn't have the strength, it was the coordination, it was like my body was a deck chair that i had forgotten how to unfold, i was concentrating on my legs to walk, but it was difficult to keep the rest of my body's in a normal posture, though with practise i improved so np.
OK so obviously horrifying, but that aside, is there any actual damage or significant damage with this kind of experience, say compared to running a marathon etc. I am in excellent physical health, very active and had a resting heart rate of 43bpm when i was 23, so what about extreme endurance athletes or people in survival situations or people that have come through concentration camp type experiences with limited food & back breaking work. All of these have pushed the limits compared to say a 9-5 existence for a time. Do they drop dead no, they recover and then go back to normal.
So disregarding a number of obviously very very significant factors, just focusing on the physical, is there any problem with going without food or sleep for long periods of time, (not as your day job, and not 100 & 100s of times, just say a relatively small number of times)
Answers:
Lots of studies have been done on sleep deprivation, and it's not conclusive as to whether there's any lasting damage (because you don't know what would have happened if the subject hadn't been deprived of sleep).
However, banging your head against a wall all day may not cause damage if you're lucky, but why would you do it?
sleep deprivation can lead to brain damage, even death, so iwould at least try to get around 4 hours every other night, if you can't then go get some sleeping pills!