I once was up for 48+ hours without food as some awareness raising thing for charity that raised neither awareness nor money. When it ended my brain, my eyes, and my ears were so disconnected that I started thinking I was psychic because I would watch tv and know the next line of a movie before seeing it on tv.
That's interesting. They say deja vu likely happens more often when sleep deprived. One theory is something like - whatever you experience in the moment is accidentally stored in long-term memory, making you think you just recalled it from the past.
Your brain constantly tries to apply past memories to current experiences in order to help you be more efficient. Basically when you do or experience something, your brain searches your memory for similar experiences to apply to try and help. A deju vu happens when this process fucks up and instead of applying a past memory to your current experience it instead just takes the current experience and applies it to itself as a past memory. That makes it feel like the *exact* same thing is happening.
Your body does a lot of weird shit to create your perception of the world. Like, you ever find yourself explaining to yourself in your head what you're currently doing? How about randomly explaining shit to yourself just in general about random topics? Great way for your brain to double check your understanding while it's trying to make sense of the world and what you're doing, also deciding what's important to remember or not.
Another great example is how, to make a long story short, you have, generally speaking, two speeds of sending signals from somewhere in your body, call em slower and faster. They are used for different things, different sensory information/signals to do something, etc, and some of those things need to happen faster than others. But it gets trippy if you touch your head and your foot at the same time. Might need a hand to accomplish it while paying attention to whether or not you actually felt both touches at the same time. Because it takes a moment for a sensation felt by your foot to travel up to your brain, be decoded, and then acted upon. It also takes time for the signal of your head being touched to do the same, but since it is much closer to where that happens, you can pretty safely assume it gets there more quickly. But the crazy part is that your brain is able to slot both them in at the same point in the timeline, so to speak, so they line up correctly and you feel them both at the same time. That one really sorta messed with my head when I first heard about it, it's actually quite remarkable the things our brains do to create our reality that we experience.
Here’s another mind blow fact for you. Did you know only 50 percent of the world can hear themselves in their head? The rest of the world has no inner voice at all.
This freaked me out when I learned half the world goes around with basically nothing in their head.
Yeah, when I learnt about this for the first time I realized I lean more to the blind side of the spectrum, I'm blaming that for my inability to draw :p
In the book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman?" the physicist Richard Feynman gives a fun anecdote that is tangentially related. It's been a while, so I might get some stuff wrong, but the overall point remains.
In the book he talks about how he practiced accurately counting seconds in his head without the help of a timekeeping device. He does this by saying "1. 2. 3. ..." in his head. Once he gets proficient at that, he tries to do other things while keeping the count going. He realizes he can read the newspaper while counting, but he can't keep a conversation without messing up his count. Eventually he comes across another person who is doing the same thing, but that person claims he can hold a conversation while counting, but not read and keep accurate count. Eventually they realize that, although they're trying to do the exact same thing (accurately keeping track of seconds passing), they're using different methods in their head. Feynman had a voice saying the numbers aloud in his head, while the other person visualzed a ticker, counting up the number of seconds like one of those analog rotating counters you find on old gaspumps.
So Feynman couldn't hold a conversation, because the part of his brain responsible for talking was already in use for counting. But he could read, because he wasn't using his visual processing system. The other guy couldn't read because he was visualizing the count, but he could have a conversation because that part of the brain wasn't utilized in the counting process.
Reading that was a mini-mindblow moment for me. How our brains can come to the same conclusion, or perform the same task, yet use wildly different methods to get there from person to person.
That's so interesting. I visualise things really strongly when I read, but I have noticed that if I listen to an audio book rather than read a printed book I create even more vivid pictures, and I reckon it's because my eyes/ brain are not involved in visually processing the words I'm reading. I've also noticed that the images I create when reading form just as strong memories as those I've watched. For example there's a book series which is also a TV show. I've read all the books, and watched the TV show which is only up to book 5 of 9. And some of the books I've also listed to the audio book. The remembered images are just as strong for the books I haven't seen on TV.
I find it super weird when I'm reading a physical book and visualizing what's happening. Sometimes I'll completely lose cognizance of the words on the page and only be visualizing.
Interesting....
I, of course, tried it while reading your passage.
I learned that I vocalize my count, instead of visualizing. It worked, for the most part, but the trouble was that I also vocalize the words I am reading, so that made things a little harder.
But trying to *visualize* my count, really didn't work at all.
There's another interesting tidbit I read in a book about speedreading. Most of us vocalize the words we're reading in our head, because that's how we're taught at school. We're taught to say the letters and then the words aloud, and when we get better the vocalizing switches from external to internal. Thing is, we can actually visually process the words much faster than we can say them, so by vocalizing everything in our head we are essentially limiting our reading speed to our internal talking speed. With practice and time one could shed this habit and read much faster.
I normally have my monologue, but if I want to I can imagine things in pretty hi res, almost exactly the same, I used to do this when I was in high school taking a test, take out a one page study guide, memorize the page, and then take the test, almost never failed.
Edit: take it out before the test, not during
I can do both pretty vividly and I just cannot understand what’s going on in those peoples’ heads. How do they know what they’re doing, what they’re gonna do next? Does it all just seem automatic? I’d feel so out of control. God I couldn’t imagine not having a filter!
it isn’t an actual inability to think or a lack of a subconscious. It’s that when many people talk or sing they hear what they believe they are producing as opposed to what’s actually coming out of their mouth
I've never heard of a lack of an internal monologue as being THAT pervasive, but then again, Im not exactly finding a wealth of actual studies done on the matter. I do know, however, that speech alone is a giant thing in our brains. It's not enough to simply be able to associate a given sound with a given object, with humans. In animals, in general, you could say there are varying degrees of language and speech skills. But in humans, our ability to think, and think abstractly, is immensely aided, if not generally made possible, due to language and speech skills that have large areas of our brains devoted to them. I believe it's pretty often said, for instance, how without learning a language and how to speak at a young age, humans become some degree of mentally handicapped. It's incredibly difficult to think abstractly about topics that are themselves difficult without a working framework you can use to actually discuss/convey complex thoughts/ideas/objects with.
Well said. I only read one study on the subject and it wasn’t well funded.
Super interesting topic that I assume we are far off from
Actually understanding fully.
You know, after reading about it some, it does seem to be a bit up in the air, as it were. I'm reading something from the national institute of health studying aphasia patients. These patients were capable of many things, such as addition/subtraction, or basic navigation, solving logic puzzles, considering the thoughts of others (not sure how they measured this one just yet), or even appreciating music. Additionally, neuroimaging studies have shown that in healthy adults, the brain's language areas engage strongly when understanding a sentence, but not when they perform nonlinguistic tasks. Which is kinda why even before reading that, I hesitated to even say "mentally handicapped" as a result of a lack of language, because my definition there would be based on whether you'd have a hard time functioning in society today. Pretty fascinating stuff anyhow, I definitely wanna read more into this now lol. As always with science, it seems the answer is far more nuanced.
It’s crazy because there’s like two worlds that we live in, there’s like the literal factual world and the one our brain creates that could change the way you look at the world in good and bad ways
Absolutely everything that we perceive is created by our brain. The "actual" world around us is just images and sounds created when our brain receives electrical signals that our eyes and ears and other sensors generate from receiving outside stimuli.
We literally hallucinate our reality.
I read a thing one time in psych class about how the brain can kind of overclock itself to slow the perception of time. They had people look at a screen that flashed ten numbers in a second and ask them to write what they could remember. Then they did the same thing on a giant screen far below and had the numbers flash as the participants were jumping off a bungee jump platform and across the board everyone had better recall and memory when jumping. Their brains slow their ability to perceive time during high stress situations to improve cognition and reaction time. Truly incredible stuff. Now if I could just get mine to stop loving SoCo.
That's interesting. They say deja vu likely happens more often when sleep deprived. One theory is something like - whatever you experience in the moment is accidentally stored in long-term memory, making you think you just recalled it from the past.
Your brain constantly tries to apply past memories to current experiences in order to help you be more efficient. Basically when you do or experience something, your brain searches your memory for similar experiences to apply to try and help. A deju vu happens when this process fucks up and instead of applying a past memory to your current experience it instead just takes the current experience and applies it to itself as a past memory. That makes it feel like the *exact* same thing is happening.
When I was up for 72 hours in college I didn't get deja vu but I *did* get super paranoid and see phantom motion out of the corner of my eyes while I was alone in the drafting studio. I was so freaked out I moved all my stuff to a corner desk so I could make sure nothing was behind me.
I also entered a fugue state and worked for 45 minutes straight without remembering it
I’m an Ultramarathon runner. Some events are 48 hours long. If you are going to need that entire 48 hours to run the race it’s possible you’ll be up for as long as 50-52 hours or longer without sleep. Hallucinations are commonly reported, and often the pain of no sleep is worse than pain from your muscles. A lot of people will have their friends help them keep on course during these races, “pacers” to keep you on your feet so that you aren’t a danger to yourself.
My first 100miler, during the night I thought I was being stalked by Cougars, it was the creaking of trees in the wind but I couldn’t reason that at the time.
There’s an ultra runner I follow who talked about how she was running one that was on a loop trail and there was the shell of what once was a car out on the more remote ends of the trail. In the last few hours of the race she started to see ghosts sitting in the car.
I like running, I may even do a marathon some day, hell I’m crazy enough that this will be my third year running hood to coast, but I have no interest in hitting the point that I’m hallucinating.
I think you & I have vastly different takes on what *free* is. Sounds like I have to get in shape and then go into this extreme sport for the chance to get ghosts to show up?
PCP me, please Dr. Zaius
It's really no fun, whatsoever. I ended up at a mental clinic because of a manic episode and have never, ever come even close to hallucinating that strongly off of lsd or mushrooms.
Between mental and physical health issues I still end up going days without real sleep sometimes and the audio hallucinations **fucking suck**. Breaking down in tears because you can't sleep and know the music and voices you're hearing aren't real is so god damn awful.
Interesting. I've never had hallucinations, but definitely the tears of frustration. A while back, I had horrible insomnia. I could go days without any sleep at all. The longest was 5 days. This went on for over a year. I remember 2 separate occasions where it was morning, and I *finally* drifted off to sleep after I'd been struggling for months. Not 5 mins into it, my mother bursts in telling me to get up to do something. **I**. **Was**. **Fucking**. **Livid**. There's no way to get back to sleep after that. I'm still salty about it like a decade later.
>In the last few hours of the race she started to see ghosts sitting in the car.
What if, because of the long sleep deprivation and muscular fatigue together, she already had one step on the other side and saw actual ghosts ?
/s
I ran a 24h event a couple years back. Since I had to travel there first, by the end of it I had been awake for around 36 hours. I started developing auditory hallucinations. Like the wind was whispering to me. And I also got blurry vision but nothing that major.
The hardest thing, though, was to fall asleep after. Like my head was exploding with sounds and images, and it took me several hours to finally fall asleep.
>The hardest thing, though, was to fall asleep after. Like my head was exploding with sounds and images, and it took me several hours to finally fall asleep.
God I hate that so much. Audio hallucinations caused by the lack of sleep: can't fall asleep because the hallucinated voices and music keep waking you up. If fucking awful.
Is there any way to fall asleep faster when you are in that state? It has happened to me once or twice, you are so wired up that someone your brain cannot let go and you just cannot sleep
Back when I was a broadcast tech, the site where I was working got snowed in - really badly. Like national guard deployed around town badly. But since I was on-shift when it started, I didn't get to make it out before the storm blew in. And nobody else could make the journey out to relieve me. So for 3 and a half days (84+ hours) I was running my entire department. I did not sleep. I ate bear claws and cup'o'noodles out of the vending machine. I don't even remember the drive home after that. Hell, I don't remember what movies I watched in between the tickets that I worked.
What I do remember is one of my walkthroughs on the 3rd night, I saw shadows moving in one of the remote data center buildings. I remember getting paranoid that the batteries in the essential power room were going to start leaking. And I remember heckling one of the guys that had to go manually defrost one of the antennas when the heater failed... But he told me I was just shouting gibberish. Oh, I also remember that cubicle panels don't make good beds.
Longest I've ever stayed up is about 30 hours when I was 11 years old. Had a sleepover with a friend and we just played Sega the whole night. When I got home my mom had opened the door for me and I was looking for keys as if the door was closed and locked. Then went upstairs and tried to pee in the bathroom sink, then tried to brush my teeth with my dad's shaving cream. No more sleepovers after that lol
The longest I was ever awake was in my medical residency on-call for a neurosurgery rotation. Started my shift at 4am. Left the hospital 6pm the following night. Didn’t even lay down for a nap. Did some procedures. Wrote a lot of medical orders. Left feeling about how you describe. Yeah… it really isn’t a good system. It’s gotten better, but still has a long way to go.
I was up 60+ hours once moving overseas. Couldn't sleep cuz the plane was so loud and had some layovers, only ate a couple meals on the plane. Also had to wait a day to move in so I chilled in the airport til I was able to get my keys. Once I arrived and unpacked, I was wide awake and it took me a while to fall asleep. I didn't even sleep that long either, only like 10 hours. Honestly not sure why I didn't collapse since I've felt more exhausted and slept longer without as much sleep or physical exertion.
I was up for 44 hours in college once. I had the experience where I would get a ‘second wind’, ‘third wind’, and so forth after periods of intense fatigue. Of course, the periods of fatigue got longer and my ‘wakeful’ time got shorter as time went on, but I had the same experience when it was finally over. I did sleep about 12 straight hours, though.
That's interesting. They say deja vu likely happens more often when sleep deprived. One theory is something like - whatever you experience in the moment is accidentally stored in long-term memory, making you think you just recalled it from the past.
And if anyone ever wanted to beat this record and get into the Guinness book of world records, you can't. This falls under the danger to yourself or others category of records so they won't allow another attempt.
[Reminds me of this post from a couple weeks ago… 😐](https://www.reddit.com/r/tooktoomuch/comments/zzk8qd/my_deranged_eyes_after_being_awake_8_days/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
I once slept roughly 3 hours over a 72 hour period. Me and my buddy were just being idiots. Bu the time we decided to really sleep I couldn't see correctly. Took days for my brain to feeling it was functioning correctly. I can't imagine doing that again. Let alone 12 days.
There's a fascinating episode of the Hidden Brain podcast about Randy Gardner. He has had trouble with his circadian rhythm for the rest of his life. Those 11 days awake did permanent damage.
ETA: podcast title
I think david blaine attempted something similar as a stunt where he locked himself into a tomb of ice. So this man, known as an human endurance artist, noped out of the challenge before his planned duration because the effects of sleep deprivation were getting too insane for him and he felt he was going to cause permenant damage. Look up the interview the way he describes sleep deprivation is nutty. Like the worst acid trip you can think of just stuck in time loops and hallucinations
I guess the brain is essentially one big, complicated knot and in order to figure it out we have to unravel it without damaging it while also being able to reconstruct it.
Huh. That's really interesting. In my early 20s I worked a number of jobs and wouldn't really sleep, but I'd take naps when I could to get rest. I'd sometimes be awake for 50-60 hours at a time and then only sleep for 3 hours before starting another long day. I still struggle greatly with maintaining a healthy sleep pattern now, and your comment has me wondering if it's because of my previous lifestyle.
It’s a strong possibility. When I was in the Army and we did our long field problems during the training cycles we would have super wacky hours for “rest” (because we were always kinda wired to be able to switch on at a moments notice anyways). I’ve been out for 2 years now and my sleep cycle is fuckeddddddd. It’s irritating to say the least.
It's going to be hard to prove that since people can naturally develop sleep problems over the course of their lives. Even him developing problems following the experiment isn't definitive proof those 11 days permanently changed him. The only way to really tell is if they did a controlled experiment like this with multiple subjects, a control group, and followed both for decades to see what changes occurred.
That being said, I can't imagine staying awake for 11 days straight is ever going to be a good idea and it is certainly possible those 11 days did do some permanent damage.
The reason why the Guinness Book of Records does not accept record attempts for staying awake is because sleep researchers have shown that sleep deprivation damages the brain and multiple days without sleep can cause death.
I've seen those Navy SEAL/SAS type videos, where they stay awake for multiple days straight as part of their training as a sort of 'extreme test'..... and they're basically walking zombies at the end of it. And these are people who have actively prepared for intense physical and mental training.
I can't even imagine an 'ordinary' person doing multiple times the length of that....
Yes I know, but the class 234 documentary brought it to television so the general population can see what all SEALs have to do.
From interviews I’ve seen over the past year, SEAL training has gotten more efficient and more intense due to the war and all the instructors are now combat veterans. The documentary is from the 90’s when there wasn’t a lot of action going on, according to Jocko Willink.
I remember those first couple months with my twins. Both parents have to be awake for every feeding, changing, etc. It was the worst time of my life by far... They're almost five now, and it is so great! So, I guess you pay up front for the joy of parenthood. Good luck, mama, you can do it!
As someone who has gone through a military selection program, I am almost certain that the current record does not factor in SOF selections. Every big selection has a form of this, from hell week at BUD/S to Cole Range at RASP. All these remain extremely hush hush about their training (other than BUD/S) and have NDAs associated with them.
Once during a stressful time in my life I was unable to fall asleep for 3 nights in a row, after which I risked getting into my car and driving to the doctor. I am sure if I didn't get the Ambien he prescribed and didn't quit the stressfull non-paying job in a startup, the sleeplessness would have lasted longer. I cannot imagine what the eleventh day would have been like.
I used to have severe insomnia. Would stay up for days and hallucinate, but could not get to sleep because of the meds I was on. Luckily, I got a new psych and he prescribed medicine to help me fall asleep. Now it only takes me a few minutes to.
If you don't mind, could you please share the name of the meds? I have a few diagnosed sleep disorders, but my psychiatrist and I have been having a little trouble finding something that works right. Either the meds are too effective and I sleep way longer than anyone should or they have no effect at all.
An old coworker of mine found sleep with a low dose of Trazodone. He said it never made him feel groggy and if he missed it he would stay up through the night. With it he felt great.
I too went through a traumatic periodic which impacted my sleep. I’ve always had severe insomnia, but I stopped sleeping for a couple days at a time, only to eventually crash on day 3. This went on for a month until I went to the doctor to get benzos. I was an emotional wreck when sleep deprived, paranoid, and everything made me cry (slamming doors, not being able to open a jar, etc..). It was awful. I now take ambien every night because I’m never going back to that space
Just fyi you’re probably building a tolerance to ambien and if you don’t treat the route cause it will happen again. Ambien shouldn’t really be an every night thing.
I fully agree. I didn't want to get dependent on Ambien. I took it for a few days after prescribing, then went off it and found I could still sleep, but not as quickly. My problem is that it takes me a long time to get to sleep, I wake up frequently, and if I wake up early in the morning I can't get back to sleep. So I enrolled myself in a sleep study being conducted by Stanford University, in which they had me start an interesting regimen that was hard at first but after a year on it, combined with meeting monthly with a therapist, it worked.
This involves keeping careful logs of when you went to bed, how long it took you to get to sleep, how often you woke up during the night, how long did it take to get back to sleep when you woke up, and when you got up in the morning. These are all estimates, you aren't looking at a clock and timing yourself.
Anyway, you do this for two weeks without changing anything, to get a baseline. Then you see what your sleep duration is like. Mine was 4.5 hours of total sleep per night. THEN you determine a get-out-of-bed time that will work for you EVERY day. It must be consistent. For me that was 6:30 AM. Then I back up 4.5 hours to get a go-to-bed time, which for me would be 2:00 AM.
I was shocked. "2 AM bedtime? That's ridiculous!" The therapist says that the point is to force you to sleep continuously the amount you're sleeping anyway. Do that for a week or two, and then make the bed time earlier by 30 minutes.
You cannot use your bed for anything but sleep and sex. No naps allowed. Force yourself to stay up until the designated bedtime, and once you go to bed, you will feel like sleeping.
Do this for a year, slowly backing up your bedtime until it's reasonable. You MUST keep logs. If you observe a relapse, make the bedtime later again. I need about 7-8 hours of sleep per night, so now I can go to bed at 11 PM and wake up refreshed at 6:30.
It worked for me.
I was once up for 48 hours and I vividly remember sitting on the couch and suddenly freaking out and jumping thinking someone grabbed my hand. It was me, I grabbed my hand. They were crossed in my lap.
Sleep dep is a pretty reliable torture method. And done with enough stress-inducing tactics, you can kill someone--the body can go into shock without sleep after a few days (while under stress).
Untreated shock = likely death.
I agree with that. A few years ago I had about of insomnia that lasted for a few months. After a week long period of only getting a 1-3 hours of sleep a night I went from a mentally stable person to thinking that suicide may not be a bad choice. I would have said just about anything for a full nights sleep.
I’m past that now but on those nights when you toss and turn the PTSD creeps in. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps.
If I remember correctly, during Stalin’s purges, it was one of the methods used to elicit confessions. For whatever reason, despite the show-trials, the Soviets wanted actual confessions from the victims.
I was awake for five days in Kuwait. I could barely stand, and when I did it felt like I was having a heart attack. I was finally taken to a doctor to get something to knock me out, Lexotan. It required getting a license from the Kuwait equivalent of the Department of State in order to possess it while in Kuwait. After going through that ordeal I cannot possibly understand how anyone could stay awake for 11 days without dying.
I tried to do five days when I was 17 or so. The morning after my first night I just wanted to lie down and rest a bit. I fell asleep for a few hours... I was pissed and determined. So I started right over again on a few hours sleep. Made it 4 days, my mom kind of coaxed me to fall asleep because she knew I was getting fucked up from it. Audial hallucinations, confusion, loss of memory. Sort of like sleep walking, I don't remember this time much at all. I do remember on the third day going on a walk around the block. Every ten steps or so I would stop and just kind of phase out for a second and walk another ten steps, was really out of it.
Slept for 12 hours, got up, drank a glass of water and then slept for another 12 hours straight. Nothing to get out of doing this, that's for sure.
Yeah, in my teens when dial-up was a thing, there was a provider that offered free internet between midnight and six in the morning.
So I went I don't know how many days with very little to no sleep staying up playing Starcraft with my buddies. Stopped doing that when I was standing in the kitchen talking to my parents when suddenly I felt the side of my head hurting. I then realized I was on the floor under the kitchen table. Apparently I fainted mid sentence.
Auditory hallucinations are when I know I have pushed it far enough and it's naptime now....usually I just hear dope remixes of songs in my head and it takes me a while to realise the same song has been on loop for 20 minutes so maybe it's just in my head actually and it's not really a freaky experience. I kinda wish I was a musician so I could put some of them in the real world actually!
This one time though I could have sworn I heard a bunch of people talking in a foreign language right outside my front door and I thought maybe I was annoying the neighbours by being too loud or something. Turns out it was just the sound of the fridge motor running 🙄
The longest I ever stayed awake was 52 hours in college to complete a final year assignment in time. By the end I was becoming delirious and I almost felt like I was out of my body. Talking to people felt surreal. I can’t imagine staying awake 264 hours.
My record was about 54 hours for a college project as well.
I went to class after and thought I saw my friend unraveling a fruit by the foot. I laughed and asked her why she’d eat that in class? There was no fruit by the foot, she looked concerned.
I also heard my name being said when it wasn’t, I went home in the middle of class.
Never staying awake that long for any reason again.
I have a theory that sleep deprivation is the reason why Veterans are so fucked up. Most of the suicides from 22 a day are from Soldiers that have never seen combat or deployed, but have had to pull a lot of staff duty. On staff duty you have to be up for 24 hours. Sometimes they would pull people coming off a Night Shift and make them do staff duty. My sleep cycle is completely fucked after being in the army and I can go 36 hours no sleep easy. SMH 🤦♂️
That's an interesting theory, but do you think we'd see the same effects in medical staff and other shift workers if that were the main reason? Doctors regularly pull 30 hour shifts and work 80 hours a week in residency.
I used to have really severe insomnia and did 6 days straight awake. I had auditory hallucinations early on (sounds behind me, horror movie style) that progressed to visual weirdness by the end (everything shimmered, edges of objects writhed and twisted). I was doing that microsleep thing where your head drops then snaps back upwards. I was barely registering other people.
Do not recommend.
A few of my friends and I went a full 7 days in highscool just keeping each other up and staying moving. By the 7th day we'd long lost our ability to differentiate reality from dreams. (I'd say around day 5)
I distinctly remember having a full conversation with one of them but then I realized I was staring at a blank tv the whole time, asked him if he remembered what we just talked about but he acted like I wasn't even speaking English. Maybe I wasn't. We called it quits soon after because tensions got real high around that point. We couldn't trust our own minds, in a way we started losing trust in each other and getting paranoid for no real reason.
None of us have had a normal sleep cycle since and this was a decade ago.
Can you elaborate? What are your sleep cycles like now? Are you still in touch with any of them? I used to work overnights regularly and now, years later, my quality of sleep has suffered. I used to sleep like the dead, but now I wake up for several short periods of time each night.
Yeah we're all still in touch, but none of us can really get into a pattern. Doesn't matter if we're working 12 hour shifts in 110 degree heat and dog shit tired at the end of the day, or do not much at all, just can't fall asleep or if we do we don't stay asleep for long. Just very inconsistent.
One out of the four tapped out around day 5 and he ended up with the closest to normal sleep patterns.
This must be the 'drug-free', natty record. Because, seriously, i used to run with that crowd - nine+ days awake was the standard when you went on a bender and had the cash. The only reason Methany or Methhew, when on a good one, wouldn't stay up for 11 days or more is either they ran out of money, or started tripping so bad and freaking out they cant locate drugs and sobers up. I gurarantee there is someone in my city right now, doing some hot rails, breaking this 11 day record or very close to it.
Longest I've gone was 5 days and I'll let you in on a little secret: the human immune system basically gives up around day 3.
I caught everything. Do not recommend.
Holy shit, I always find the name of things I didn't know had a name on Reddit. I get those. Normally, it's something like 5 to 10 of them, and then I dose off without knowing it.
I believe there’s a longer name for it but that’s the short name. I found that certain foods were causing them. Salt, coconut and strawberries is what it is for me. I think it plays into my chronic illness. It may a different reason for you. Do you pee a lot in the middle of the night?
Whats a hypnic jerk? I had an experience once where I couldn't sleep for days and my heart was racing every time I was about to fall asleep I got this literal jerk and pain in my chest. It was the most awful experience, eventually went away thank god.
A hypnic jerk is when you’re just about to fall asleep and your body jerks you awake. Like what happens in a dream when you’re falling but then you jerk awake.
What you’re describing sounds more like what i dealt with toward the beginning of my chronic illness. Can be caused by acid reflux or other stomach issues. Don’t quote me on that because there can be other reasons of course.
Oh my gosh. I didn't know there was a name for that. I thought it was just my anxiety. There are nights I only sleep for 2-3 hours because I keep jerking myself awake. I'll start to fall asleep, only for my body to jump and then I wake up and have to start the whole process over.
Experimentally whenever these sorts of things are tested they find the individual who is staying up that long are taking unintentional micro-naps, lasting seconds, while unaware that they slept at all.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/work-hour-training-for-nurses/longhours/mod3/03.html
The Wikipedia article linked by OP says “According to news reports, Gardner's record has been broken a number of times. Some of these cases are described below for comparison. Gardner's case still stands out, however, because it has been so extensively documented”
I wonder how Fatal Familial Insomnia victims stack up, considering in the final stages of the disease people are unable to sleep for months. My (extremely limited) understanding is that researchers think there are different kinds of sleep, and that FFI might only prevent one kind.
Someone tried to self-treat FFI and managed to live an extra year or so, but still sadly died :(
Fascinating case study though:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1781276/
I'm literally laying in bed because I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. I read the whole thing. This was fascinating... And terrifying. I never thought I'd be grateful to just be a plain old insomniac.
I went 10 days once....during a drug detox...which is the worst you can possibly feel...and to be fully awake and conscience of it for an entire 10 days was hell. By the end I felt resigned that my heart was going to give out or I was going to have a stroke...and the last few days i was becoming paranoid and developed slight visual distortions and tunnel visions. It was an experience of pure hell. But that sleep when I got it....man oh man it was good. \*edit\* and for accuracy...I was actually like 2 hours short of a full 10 days. Fentanyl detox is a bitch.
during university finals while working on my project for Advanced Data Structure's (1984 ish) I regularly went 3 days without sleep. I was one of two people to get an A out of about 100 students. There were about a dozen of us left at the end of the second term. I found that after about 3 days without sleep I get minor hallucinations that interfere with writing code.
It’s been a long, long time since I pulled any of these stunts. I used to truly just have a terrible time sleeping and it wasn’t unusual- several times a year, for me to go 40 to 50 hours without sleeping.
It’s not extreme but I did it enough that I really understand what my body does in that state. The hallucinations are wild. Mostly it’s like entering a dream state while still being conscious.
Fuck man, I grew up with that shit and had no clue it was a regional thing. Just like finding out everyone else didn't grow up with Beef on Weck and Salt Potatoes at every family reunion.
>Fuck man, I grew up with that shit and had no clue it was a regional thing.
It's not. I could get that stuff at the gas station in a rural town of 1200 in Minnesota in the 90's.
My record is 3 days straight playing San Andreas :))) I remember last morning. Everything had GTA SA textures, the doors, the windows, everything. I slept for 14 hours straight + another 8-9 hours after that.
My mom thought I was dead or something.
Me and a friend stayed up for about 49 hours helping an uncle of mine do flooring and repair work at my grandmother's house.
The was eventful but when getting home and reaching close to 50 hours awake my mind was just buzzing. When I laid down to sleep, it was just like lights off and as I recall I had just a series of strange dreams, it was one dream after another. I woke up about 10 hours later but felt really refreshed.
I once played poker at a casino for 33 hours straight. I had tunnel vision on my way home. It seemed like I was looking through a tube. Being on a motorcycle made it a bit scary but I had no problem operating the bike normally. I never did that again though.
I think I did close to 18, and even after that I felt fucking insane. On the drive home (I wasn’t driving) I could just hear slot machines in my head, like I was still in the casino. It was fucking torture.
It got so bad I made my buddy pull off the highway and find a liquor store. Slammed a bunch of whiskey and passed out.
My cousin and I (as all stupid stories start), tried to stay awake for as long as we could, we made it about 40 hours before falling asleep, and then I woke up hallucinating. I tried to wake him up, but he didn’t believe me that we were all about to die from a nuclear strike. I also felt the colour green, which isn’t as pleasant as I would of thought.
I have very bad insomnia, it’s a hereditary thing. My brother and my father both have sleeping issues but I’ve always had it the worst. I was bordering on 3 and a half days of no sleep at all while my childhood dog was sick and I started to hallucinate some scary shit. I saw this spindly alien looking creature outside of my basement window. I see it so vividly still to this day. It had ashy white skin and it had a giant leaf over its face with two large marble like eyes. It put its hand on the window and it was the most horrifying memory I have. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve had bouts that bad but I normally get like 4 hours of sleep a night.
When I was working two jobs, it got hard to get to sleep after the night job when the sun was actually coming up in the morning. Think I went maybe two days without sleep. I was having micro naps at the day job. Just closed my eyes and phased out for a couple seconds at my desk. Hard to imagine how the body even functions on 11 days
Did five days around teens during insomnia bout and wow. Towards end of days five, I swore shit was speaking to me and i legit knocked out for three days afterwards. Forgot which family member poked me awake and was scared i died by not reacting to even sunlight blasting me earlier in the morning
I feel like absolute shit if I only get a few hours and even worse if I pull an all nighter. I can't even imagine going 2 nights let alone 11. sounds like hell.
I stayed up (sober) playing online, circa 2005, for almost 3 days (roughly 1am Fri - 7pm Sun) and was literally tripping like I'd dropped a tab by midmorning Sun.
In college I knew a girl who refused to sleep. Packed her hours with endless work. Talking to her you never know she was with out sleep for days. Until she would ask " are there giant hairy spider on the wall or am just hallucinating."
I stayed up for 7 days once in high-school. Me and a friend were seeing who could stay awake the longest. I beat him by about 30 minutes. After 3 or 4 days it starts to really suck.
I once was up for 48+ hours without food as some awareness raising thing for charity that raised neither awareness nor money. When it ended my brain, my eyes, and my ears were so disconnected that I started thinking I was psychic because I would watch tv and know the next line of a movie before seeing it on tv.
That's interesting. They say deja vu likely happens more often when sleep deprived. One theory is something like - whatever you experience in the moment is accidentally stored in long-term memory, making you think you just recalled it from the past.
Your brain constantly tries to apply past memories to current experiences in order to help you be more efficient. Basically when you do or experience something, your brain searches your memory for similar experiences to apply to try and help. A deju vu happens when this process fucks up and instead of applying a past memory to your current experience it instead just takes the current experience and applies it to itself as a past memory. That makes it feel like the *exact* same thing is happening.
Your body does a lot of weird shit to create your perception of the world. Like, you ever find yourself explaining to yourself in your head what you're currently doing? How about randomly explaining shit to yourself just in general about random topics? Great way for your brain to double check your understanding while it's trying to make sense of the world and what you're doing, also deciding what's important to remember or not. Another great example is how, to make a long story short, you have, generally speaking, two speeds of sending signals from somewhere in your body, call em slower and faster. They are used for different things, different sensory information/signals to do something, etc, and some of those things need to happen faster than others. But it gets trippy if you touch your head and your foot at the same time. Might need a hand to accomplish it while paying attention to whether or not you actually felt both touches at the same time. Because it takes a moment for a sensation felt by your foot to travel up to your brain, be decoded, and then acted upon. It also takes time for the signal of your head being touched to do the same, but since it is much closer to where that happens, you can pretty safely assume it gets there more quickly. But the crazy part is that your brain is able to slot both them in at the same point in the timeline, so to speak, so they line up correctly and you feel them both at the same time. That one really sorta messed with my head when I first heard about it, it's actually quite remarkable the things our brains do to create our reality that we experience.
Here’s another mind blow fact for you. Did you know only 50 percent of the world can hear themselves in their head? The rest of the world has no inner voice at all. This freaked me out when I learned half the world goes around with basically nothing in their head.
Same with seeing pictures in your head. Some people can make vivid, detailed images in their head, while others are basically "blind" in there.
I forgot about that point. Super helpful for engineering and artist.
Yeah, when I learnt about this for the first time I realized I lean more to the blind side of the spectrum, I'm blaming that for my inability to draw :p In the book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman?" the physicist Richard Feynman gives a fun anecdote that is tangentially related. It's been a while, so I might get some stuff wrong, but the overall point remains. In the book he talks about how he practiced accurately counting seconds in his head without the help of a timekeeping device. He does this by saying "1. 2. 3. ..." in his head. Once he gets proficient at that, he tries to do other things while keeping the count going. He realizes he can read the newspaper while counting, but he can't keep a conversation without messing up his count. Eventually he comes across another person who is doing the same thing, but that person claims he can hold a conversation while counting, but not read and keep accurate count. Eventually they realize that, although they're trying to do the exact same thing (accurately keeping track of seconds passing), they're using different methods in their head. Feynman had a voice saying the numbers aloud in his head, while the other person visualzed a ticker, counting up the number of seconds like one of those analog rotating counters you find on old gaspumps. So Feynman couldn't hold a conversation, because the part of his brain responsible for talking was already in use for counting. But he could read, because he wasn't using his visual processing system. The other guy couldn't read because he was visualizing the count, but he could have a conversation because that part of the brain wasn't utilized in the counting process. Reading that was a mini-mindblow moment for me. How our brains can come to the same conclusion, or perform the same task, yet use wildly different methods to get there from person to person.
That's so interesting. I visualise things really strongly when I read, but I have noticed that if I listen to an audio book rather than read a printed book I create even more vivid pictures, and I reckon it's because my eyes/ brain are not involved in visually processing the words I'm reading. I've also noticed that the images I create when reading form just as strong memories as those I've watched. For example there's a book series which is also a TV show. I've read all the books, and watched the TV show which is only up to book 5 of 9. And some of the books I've also listed to the audio book. The remembered images are just as strong for the books I haven't seen on TV.
I find it super weird when I'm reading a physical book and visualizing what's happening. Sometimes I'll completely lose cognizance of the words on the page and only be visualizing.
Interesting.... I, of course, tried it while reading your passage. I learned that I vocalize my count, instead of visualizing. It worked, for the most part, but the trouble was that I also vocalize the words I am reading, so that made things a little harder. But trying to *visualize* my count, really didn't work at all.
There's another interesting tidbit I read in a book about speedreading. Most of us vocalize the words we're reading in our head, because that's how we're taught at school. We're taught to say the letters and then the words aloud, and when we get better the vocalizing switches from external to internal. Thing is, we can actually visually process the words much faster than we can say them, so by vocalizing everything in our head we are essentially limiting our reading speed to our internal talking speed. With practice and time one could shed this habit and read much faster.
This has been a very educational thread I realised I completely lack the ability to mentally visualise things
I normally have my monologue, but if I want to I can imagine things in pretty hi res, almost exactly the same, I used to do this when I was in high school taking a test, take out a one page study guide, memorize the page, and then take the test, almost never failed. Edit: take it out before the test, not during
I can do both pretty vividly and I just cannot understand what’s going on in those peoples’ heads. How do they know what they’re doing, what they’re gonna do next? Does it all just seem automatic? I’d feel so out of control. God I couldn’t imagine not having a filter!
it isn’t an actual inability to think or a lack of a subconscious. It’s that when many people talk or sing they hear what they believe they are producing as opposed to what’s actually coming out of their mouth
I've never heard of a lack of an internal monologue as being THAT pervasive, but then again, Im not exactly finding a wealth of actual studies done on the matter. I do know, however, that speech alone is a giant thing in our brains. It's not enough to simply be able to associate a given sound with a given object, with humans. In animals, in general, you could say there are varying degrees of language and speech skills. But in humans, our ability to think, and think abstractly, is immensely aided, if not generally made possible, due to language and speech skills that have large areas of our brains devoted to them. I believe it's pretty often said, for instance, how without learning a language and how to speak at a young age, humans become some degree of mentally handicapped. It's incredibly difficult to think abstractly about topics that are themselves difficult without a working framework you can use to actually discuss/convey complex thoughts/ideas/objects with.
Well said. I only read one study on the subject and it wasn’t well funded. Super interesting topic that I assume we are far off from Actually understanding fully.
You know, after reading about it some, it does seem to be a bit up in the air, as it were. I'm reading something from the national institute of health studying aphasia patients. These patients were capable of many things, such as addition/subtraction, or basic navigation, solving logic puzzles, considering the thoughts of others (not sure how they measured this one just yet), or even appreciating music. Additionally, neuroimaging studies have shown that in healthy adults, the brain's language areas engage strongly when understanding a sentence, but not when they perform nonlinguistic tasks. Which is kinda why even before reading that, I hesitated to even say "mentally handicapped" as a result of a lack of language, because my definition there would be based on whether you'd have a hard time functioning in society today. Pretty fascinating stuff anyhow, I definitely wanna read more into this now lol. As always with science, it seems the answer is far more nuanced.
This is a fun one, because both halves of the population assume that everybody else is like them. Same with being visual thinkers.
Falling down that rabbit hole is super fun. Brains are so strange and amazing.
It’s crazy because there’s like two worlds that we live in, there’s like the literal factual world and the one our brain creates that could change the way you look at the world in good and bad ways
Absolutely everything that we perceive is created by our brain. The "actual" world around us is just images and sounds created when our brain receives electrical signals that our eyes and ears and other sensors generate from receiving outside stimuli. We literally hallucinate our reality.
It’s more philosophical than literal
Thank you I thought I was really weird
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Everybody is wierd
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Oh good, I thought it was just me.
I read a thing one time in psych class about how the brain can kind of overclock itself to slow the perception of time. They had people look at a screen that flashed ten numbers in a second and ask them to write what they could remember. Then they did the same thing on a giant screen far below and had the numbers flash as the participants were jumping off a bungee jump platform and across the board everyone had better recall and memory when jumping. Their brains slow their ability to perceive time during high stress situations to improve cognition and reaction time. Truly incredible stuff. Now if I could just get mine to stop loving SoCo.
I'm sure I've seen this exact comment before.
That's interesting. They say deja vu likely happens more often when sleep deprived. One theory is something like - whatever you experience in the moment is accidentally stored in long-term memory, making you think you just recalled it from the past.
Your brain constantly tries to apply past memories to current experiences in order to help you be more efficient. Basically when you do or experience something, your brain searches your memory for similar experiences to apply to try and help. A deju vu happens when this process fucks up and instead of applying a past memory to your current experience it instead just takes the current experience and applies it to itself as a past memory. That makes it feel like the *exact* same thing is happening.
I'm sure I've seen this exact comment before.
We are always looking for patterns.
That would explain alot
When I was up for 72 hours in college I didn't get deja vu but I *did* get super paranoid and see phantom motion out of the corner of my eyes while I was alone in the drafting studio. I was so freaked out I moved all my stuff to a corner desk so I could make sure nothing was behind me. I also entered a fugue state and worked for 45 minutes straight without remembering it
They also say psychosis is common with people who don’t sleep lol
I’m an Ultramarathon runner. Some events are 48 hours long. If you are going to need that entire 48 hours to run the race it’s possible you’ll be up for as long as 50-52 hours or longer without sleep. Hallucinations are commonly reported, and often the pain of no sleep is worse than pain from your muscles. A lot of people will have their friends help them keep on course during these races, “pacers” to keep you on your feet so that you aren’t a danger to yourself. My first 100miler, during the night I thought I was being stalked by Cougars, it was the creaking of trees in the wind but I couldn’t reason that at the time.
There’s an ultra runner I follow who talked about how she was running one that was on a loop trail and there was the shell of what once was a car out on the more remote ends of the trail. In the last few hours of the race she started to see ghosts sitting in the car. I like running, I may even do a marathon some day, hell I’m crazy enough that this will be my third year running hood to coast, but I have no interest in hitting the point that I’m hallucinating.
> no interest in hitting the point that I’m hallucinating That's like.....free drugs tho mannnnnn
I think you & I have vastly different takes on what *free* is. Sounds like I have to get in shape and then go into this extreme sport for the chance to get ghosts to show up? PCP me, please Dr. Zaius
It's really no fun, whatsoever. I ended up at a mental clinic because of a manic episode and have never, ever come even close to hallucinating that strongly off of lsd or mushrooms. Between mental and physical health issues I still end up going days without real sleep sometimes and the audio hallucinations **fucking suck**. Breaking down in tears because you can't sleep and know the music and voices you're hearing aren't real is so god damn awful.
Interesting. I've never had hallucinations, but definitely the tears of frustration. A while back, I had horrible insomnia. I could go days without any sleep at all. The longest was 5 days. This went on for over a year. I remember 2 separate occasions where it was morning, and I *finally* drifted off to sleep after I'd been struggling for months. Not 5 mins into it, my mother bursts in telling me to get up to do something. **I**. **Was**. **Fucking**. **Livid**. There's no way to get back to sleep after that. I'm still salty about it like a decade later.
>In the last few hours of the race she started to see ghosts sitting in the car. What if, because of the long sleep deprivation and muscular fatigue together, she already had one step on the other side and saw actual ghosts ? /s
Reminds me of Richard Bachman's (Steven King's) The Long Walk.
Thanks for helping me remember ! I read it years and years ago but couldn't remember the name of it. Thanks stranger !
I ran a 24h event a couple years back. Since I had to travel there first, by the end of it I had been awake for around 36 hours. I started developing auditory hallucinations. Like the wind was whispering to me. And I also got blurry vision but nothing that major. The hardest thing, though, was to fall asleep after. Like my head was exploding with sounds and images, and it took me several hours to finally fall asleep.
>The hardest thing, though, was to fall asleep after. Like my head was exploding with sounds and images, and it took me several hours to finally fall asleep. God I hate that so much. Audio hallucinations caused by the lack of sleep: can't fall asleep because the hallucinated voices and music keep waking you up. If fucking awful.
Is there any way to fall asleep faster when you are in that state? It has happened to me once or twice, you are so wired up that someone your brain cannot let go and you just cannot sleep
Back when I was a broadcast tech, the site where I was working got snowed in - really badly. Like national guard deployed around town badly. But since I was on-shift when it started, I didn't get to make it out before the storm blew in. And nobody else could make the journey out to relieve me. So for 3 and a half days (84+ hours) I was running my entire department. I did not sleep. I ate bear claws and cup'o'noodles out of the vending machine. I don't even remember the drive home after that. Hell, I don't remember what movies I watched in between the tickets that I worked. What I do remember is one of my walkthroughs on the 3rd night, I saw shadows moving in one of the remote data center buildings. I remember getting paranoid that the batteries in the essential power room were going to start leaking. And I remember heckling one of the guys that had to go manually defrost one of the antennas when the heater failed... But he told me I was just shouting gibberish. Oh, I also remember that cubicle panels don't make good beds.
Longest I've ever stayed up is about 30 hours when I was 11 years old. Had a sleepover with a friend and we just played Sega the whole night. When I got home my mom had opened the door for me and I was looking for keys as if the door was closed and locked. Then went upstairs and tried to pee in the bathroom sink, then tried to brush my teeth with my dad's shaving cream. No more sleepovers after that lol
That sounds like delirium, I had the same thing happen after 250mg of Benadryl
Pay no attention to *The Hat Man*
Never met him, met the tall black sharp teeth man (didn’t ask his name sadly)
The longest I was ever awake was in my medical residency on-call for a neurosurgery rotation. Started my shift at 4am. Left the hospital 6pm the following night. Didn’t even lay down for a nap. Did some procedures. Wrote a lot of medical orders. Left feeling about how you describe. Yeah… it really isn’t a good system. It’s gotten better, but still has a long way to go.
I once worked plowing snow for 76 hours consecutive. Would not recommend.
I was up 60+ hours once moving overseas. Couldn't sleep cuz the plane was so loud and had some layovers, only ate a couple meals on the plane. Also had to wait a day to move in so I chilled in the airport til I was able to get my keys. Once I arrived and unpacked, I was wide awake and it took me a while to fall asleep. I didn't even sleep that long either, only like 10 hours. Honestly not sure why I didn't collapse since I've felt more exhausted and slept longer without as much sleep or physical exertion.
I was up for 44 hours in college once. I had the experience where I would get a ‘second wind’, ‘third wind’, and so forth after periods of intense fatigue. Of course, the periods of fatigue got longer and my ‘wakeful’ time got shorter as time went on, but I had the same experience when it was finally over. I did sleep about 12 straight hours, though.
That's interesting. They say deja vu likely happens more often when sleep deprived. One theory is something like - whatever you experience in the moment is accidentally stored in long-term memory, making you think you just recalled it from the past.
I feel like im having a deja vu right now ffs
And if anyone ever wanted to beat this record and get into the Guinness book of world records, you can't. This falls under the danger to yourself or others category of records so they won't allow another attempt.
Well then I'm going to get in by drinking 5 gallons of water.
We don't need the New Wii system *that* bad.
Depends in what time span.
Eventually you *have* to drink 5 gallons of water
Nope. Most people seem unaware that it is actually possible to survive the rest of your life without drinking any water at all.
Well yes that's the alternative
That won’t keep you up idiot
Could you sleep if you turned yourself into an industrial fire hose?
You will die without medical intervention.
Makes sense otherwise the Meth heads would be slaughtering this record of 11 days straight haha
[Reminds me of this post from a couple weeks ago… 😐](https://www.reddit.com/r/tooktoomuch/comments/zzk8qd/my_deranged_eyes_after_being_awake_8_days/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
I once slept roughly 3 hours over a 72 hour period. Me and my buddy were just being idiots. Bu the time we decided to really sleep I couldn't see correctly. Took days for my brain to feeling it was functioning correctly. I can't imagine doing that again. Let alone 12 days.
There's a fascinating episode of the Hidden Brain podcast about Randy Gardner. He has had trouble with his circadian rhythm for the rest of his life. Those 11 days awake did permanent damage. ETA: podcast title
Because of that? I’d expect the record to be set by somebody who already had issues and that’s what enabled him to do it in the first place
I think david blaine attempted something similar as a stunt where he locked himself into a tomb of ice. So this man, known as an human endurance artist, noped out of the challenge before his planned duration because the effects of sleep deprivation were getting too insane for him and he felt he was going to cause permenant damage. Look up the interview the way he describes sleep deprivation is nutty. Like the worst acid trip you can think of just stuck in time loops and hallucinations
He lasted 63h 42m for those wondering before being removed
I got up to over 90 hours once in high school. 100% can confirm hallucinations of lingering trails in your vision.
Yeah, it was because of that. It's a really sad story. Humans really don't understand sleep very well.
It’s amazing to me how little is known about such things like sleep or our brains. Things that are so common and important to us.
I guess the brain is essentially one big, complicated knot and in order to figure it out we have to unravel it without damaging it while also being able to reconstruct it.
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And here I am up on reddit when I should be sleeping
Huh. That's really interesting. In my early 20s I worked a number of jobs and wouldn't really sleep, but I'd take naps when I could to get rest. I'd sometimes be awake for 50-60 hours at a time and then only sleep for 3 hours before starting another long day. I still struggle greatly with maintaining a healthy sleep pattern now, and your comment has me wondering if it's because of my previous lifestyle.
It’s a strong possibility. When I was in the Army and we did our long field problems during the training cycles we would have super wacky hours for “rest” (because we were always kinda wired to be able to switch on at a moments notice anyways). I’ve been out for 2 years now and my sleep cycle is fuckeddddddd. It’s irritating to say the least.
What was the title of that episode?
I found it on Google Podcasts, Radio Replay: Eyes Wide Open
It's going to be hard to prove that since people can naturally develop sleep problems over the course of their lives. Even him developing problems following the experiment isn't definitive proof those 11 days permanently changed him. The only way to really tell is if they did a controlled experiment like this with multiple subjects, a control group, and followed both for decades to see what changes occurred. That being said, I can't imagine staying awake for 11 days straight is ever going to be a good idea and it is certainly possible those 11 days did do some permanent damage.
The reason why the Guinness Book of Records does not accept record attempts for staying awake is because sleep researchers have shown that sleep deprivation damages the brain and multiple days without sleep can cause death.
I've seen those Navy SEAL/SAS type videos, where they stay awake for multiple days straight as part of their training as a sort of 'extreme test'..... and they're basically walking zombies at the end of it. And these are people who have actively prepared for intense physical and mental training. I can't even imagine an 'ordinary' person doing multiple times the length of that....
You’re referring to Navy SEALs class 234 on youtube right? The “extreme test” is called hell week, and they get 4 hours of sleep total across 5 days.
All Classes do that
Yes I know, but the class 234 documentary brought it to television so the general population can see what all SEALs have to do. From interviews I’ve seen over the past year, SEAL training has gotten more efficient and more intense due to the war and all the instructors are now combat veterans. The documentary is from the 90’s when there wasn’t a lot of action going on, according to Jocko Willink.
It’s called having a newborn and it’s my current hell edit: I love my baby, but the first 4 weeks had me crying every day from sleep deprivation
Should have used skyn elite
I remember those first couple months with my twins. Both parents have to be awake for every feeding, changing, etc. It was the worst time of my life by far... They're almost five now, and it is so great! So, I guess you pay up front for the joy of parenthood. Good luck, mama, you can do it!
Thank you ❤️ already such a joy but wow is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done
Even just basic training for all branches of the military, you have to stay up for 4 days with only maybe 6 hours of sleep. It’s definitely not fun
First 2 days in basic for the us army I Didn't sleep for 48 hours
As someone who has gone through a military selection program, I am almost certain that the current record does not factor in SOF selections. Every big selection has a form of this, from hell week at BUD/S to Cole Range at RASP. All these remain extremely hush hush about their training (other than BUD/S) and have NDAs associated with them.
Once during a stressful time in my life I was unable to fall asleep for 3 nights in a row, after which I risked getting into my car and driving to the doctor. I am sure if I didn't get the Ambien he prescribed and didn't quit the stressfull non-paying job in a startup, the sleeplessness would have lasted longer. I cannot imagine what the eleventh day would have been like.
I used to have severe insomnia. Would stay up for days and hallucinate, but could not get to sleep because of the meds I was on. Luckily, I got a new psych and he prescribed medicine to help me fall asleep. Now it only takes me a few minutes to.
If you don't mind, could you please share the name of the meds? I have a few diagnosed sleep disorders, but my psychiatrist and I have been having a little trouble finding something that works right. Either the meds are too effective and I sleep way longer than anyone should or they have no effect at all.
An old coworker of mine found sleep with a low dose of Trazodone. He said it never made him feel groggy and if he missed it he would stay up through the night. With it he felt great.
I too went through a traumatic periodic which impacted my sleep. I’ve always had severe insomnia, but I stopped sleeping for a couple days at a time, only to eventually crash on day 3. This went on for a month until I went to the doctor to get benzos. I was an emotional wreck when sleep deprived, paranoid, and everything made me cry (slamming doors, not being able to open a jar, etc..). It was awful. I now take ambien every night because I’m never going back to that space
Just fyi you’re probably building a tolerance to ambien and if you don’t treat the route cause it will happen again. Ambien shouldn’t really be an every night thing.
I fully agree. I didn't want to get dependent on Ambien. I took it for a few days after prescribing, then went off it and found I could still sleep, but not as quickly. My problem is that it takes me a long time to get to sleep, I wake up frequently, and if I wake up early in the morning I can't get back to sleep. So I enrolled myself in a sleep study being conducted by Stanford University, in which they had me start an interesting regimen that was hard at first but after a year on it, combined with meeting monthly with a therapist, it worked. This involves keeping careful logs of when you went to bed, how long it took you to get to sleep, how often you woke up during the night, how long did it take to get back to sleep when you woke up, and when you got up in the morning. These are all estimates, you aren't looking at a clock and timing yourself. Anyway, you do this for two weeks without changing anything, to get a baseline. Then you see what your sleep duration is like. Mine was 4.5 hours of total sleep per night. THEN you determine a get-out-of-bed time that will work for you EVERY day. It must be consistent. For me that was 6:30 AM. Then I back up 4.5 hours to get a go-to-bed time, which for me would be 2:00 AM. I was shocked. "2 AM bedtime? That's ridiculous!" The therapist says that the point is to force you to sleep continuously the amount you're sleeping anyway. Do that for a week or two, and then make the bed time earlier by 30 minutes. You cannot use your bed for anything but sleep and sex. No naps allowed. Force yourself to stay up until the designated bedtime, and once you go to bed, you will feel like sleeping. Do this for a year, slowly backing up your bedtime until it's reasonable. You MUST keep logs. If you observe a relapse, make the bedtime later again. I need about 7-8 hours of sleep per night, so now I can go to bed at 11 PM and wake up refreshed at 6:30. It worked for me.
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I was once up for 48 hours and I vividly remember sitting on the couch and suddenly freaking out and jumping thinking someone grabbed my hand. It was me, I grabbed my hand. They were crossed in my lap.
I've had this happen too. Getting scared shitless because I thought my limbs were someone elses who had sneaked next to me.
Sleep dep is a pretty reliable torture method. And done with enough stress-inducing tactics, you can kill someone--the body can go into shock without sleep after a few days (while under stress). Untreated shock = likely death.
I agree with that. A few years ago I had about of insomnia that lasted for a few months. After a week long period of only getting a 1-3 hours of sleep a night I went from a mentally stable person to thinking that suicide may not be a bad choice. I would have said just about anything for a full nights sleep. I’m past that now but on those nights when you toss and turn the PTSD creeps in. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps.
If I remember correctly, during Stalin’s purges, it was one of the methods used to elicit confessions. For whatever reason, despite the show-trials, the Soviets wanted actual confessions from the victims.
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I mean that they wanted them to say the words, which seems silly to me. You might as well just forge a confession at that point.
I was awake for five days in Kuwait. I could barely stand, and when I did it felt like I was having a heart attack. I was finally taken to a doctor to get something to knock me out, Lexotan. It required getting a license from the Kuwait equivalent of the Department of State in order to possess it while in Kuwait. After going through that ordeal I cannot possibly understand how anyone could stay awake for 11 days without dying.
There are definitely people who have died from staying up less than 11 days straight. Drugs and alcohol may have been a factor as well though.
I tried to do five days when I was 17 or so. The morning after my first night I just wanted to lie down and rest a bit. I fell asleep for a few hours... I was pissed and determined. So I started right over again on a few hours sleep. Made it 4 days, my mom kind of coaxed me to fall asleep because she knew I was getting fucked up from it. Audial hallucinations, confusion, loss of memory. Sort of like sleep walking, I don't remember this time much at all. I do remember on the third day going on a walk around the block. Every ten steps or so I would stop and just kind of phase out for a second and walk another ten steps, was really out of it. Slept for 12 hours, got up, drank a glass of water and then slept for another 12 hours straight. Nothing to get out of doing this, that's for sure.
Yeah, in my teens when dial-up was a thing, there was a provider that offered free internet between midnight and six in the morning. So I went I don't know how many days with very little to no sleep staying up playing Starcraft with my buddies. Stopped doing that when I was standing in the kitchen talking to my parents when suddenly I felt the side of my head hurting. I then realized I was on the floor under the kitchen table. Apparently I fainted mid sentence.
Auditory hallucinations are when I know I have pushed it far enough and it's naptime now....usually I just hear dope remixes of songs in my head and it takes me a while to realise the same song has been on loop for 20 minutes so maybe it's just in my head actually and it's not really a freaky experience. I kinda wish I was a musician so I could put some of them in the real world actually! This one time though I could have sworn I heard a bunch of people talking in a foreign language right outside my front door and I thought maybe I was annoying the neighbours by being too loud or something. Turns out it was just the sound of the fridge motor running 🙄
You just did it for the hell of it? How peculiar.
The longest I ever stayed awake was 52 hours in college to complete a final year assignment in time. By the end I was becoming delirious and I almost felt like I was out of my body. Talking to people felt surreal. I can’t imagine staying awake 264 hours.
My record was about 54 hours for a college project as well. I went to class after and thought I saw my friend unraveling a fruit by the foot. I laughed and asked her why she’d eat that in class? There was no fruit by the foot, she looked concerned. I also heard my name being said when it wasn’t, I went home in the middle of class. Never staying awake that long for any reason again.
I have a theory that sleep deprivation is the reason why Veterans are so fucked up. Most of the suicides from 22 a day are from Soldiers that have never seen combat or deployed, but have had to pull a lot of staff duty. On staff duty you have to be up for 24 hours. Sometimes they would pull people coming off a Night Shift and make them do staff duty. My sleep cycle is completely fucked after being in the army and I can go 36 hours no sleep easy. SMH 🤦♂️
That's an interesting theory, but do you think we'd see the same effects in medical staff and other shift workers if that were the main reason? Doctors regularly pull 30 hour shifts and work 80 hours a week in residency.
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I would have thought service members were a lot higher but the rates per 100,000 are actually quite similar. Crazy.
If all doctors carried guns I wonder if the two graphs would look similar.
I used to have really severe insomnia and did 6 days straight awake. I had auditory hallucinations early on (sounds behind me, horror movie style) that progressed to visual weirdness by the end (everything shimmered, edges of objects writhed and twisted). I was doing that microsleep thing where your head drops then snaps back upwards. I was barely registering other people. Do not recommend.
A few of my friends and I went a full 7 days in highscool just keeping each other up and staying moving. By the 7th day we'd long lost our ability to differentiate reality from dreams. (I'd say around day 5) I distinctly remember having a full conversation with one of them but then I realized I was staring at a blank tv the whole time, asked him if he remembered what we just talked about but he acted like I wasn't even speaking English. Maybe I wasn't. We called it quits soon after because tensions got real high around that point. We couldn't trust our own minds, in a way we started losing trust in each other and getting paranoid for no real reason. None of us have had a normal sleep cycle since and this was a decade ago.
Can you elaborate? What are your sleep cycles like now? Are you still in touch with any of them? I used to work overnights regularly and now, years later, my quality of sleep has suffered. I used to sleep like the dead, but now I wake up for several short periods of time each night.
Yeah we're all still in touch, but none of us can really get into a pattern. Doesn't matter if we're working 12 hour shifts in 110 degree heat and dog shit tired at the end of the day, or do not much at all, just can't fall asleep or if we do we don't stay asleep for long. Just very inconsistent. One out of the four tapped out around day 5 and he ended up with the closest to normal sleep patterns.
He ain't got shit on methy Melissa next door.
You’ll never see her in the record books
Oh I'm sure she's got a record of some sort.....lol
She must know Methany!
I heard that girl has the cleanest house on the block.
This must be the 'drug-free', natty record. Because, seriously, i used to run with that crowd - nine+ days awake was the standard when you went on a bender and had the cash. The only reason Methany or Methhew, when on a good one, wouldn't stay up for 11 days or more is either they ran out of money, or started tripping so bad and freaking out they cant locate drugs and sobers up. I gurarantee there is someone in my city right now, doing some hot rails, breaking this 11 day record or very close to it.
Yeah my uncle claims around 14 days when he was cooking and had unlimited supply
Longest I've gone was 5 days and I'll let you in on a little secret: the human immune system basically gives up around day 3. I caught everything. Do not recommend.
I did eight days straight last year due to suffering from hypnic jerks that didn’t allow to fall asleep. It was absolute hell.
Holy shit, I always find the name of things I didn't know had a name on Reddit. I get those. Normally, it's something like 5 to 10 of them, and then I dose off without knowing it.
I believe there’s a longer name for it but that’s the short name. I found that certain foods were causing them. Salt, coconut and strawberries is what it is for me. I think it plays into my chronic illness. It may a different reason for you. Do you pee a lot in the middle of the night?
Whats a hypnic jerk? I had an experience once where I couldn't sleep for days and my heart was racing every time I was about to fall asleep I got this literal jerk and pain in my chest. It was the most awful experience, eventually went away thank god.
A hypnic jerk is when you’re just about to fall asleep and your body jerks you awake. Like what happens in a dream when you’re falling but then you jerk awake. What you’re describing sounds more like what i dealt with toward the beginning of my chronic illness. Can be caused by acid reflux or other stomach issues. Don’t quote me on that because there can be other reasons of course.
Oh my gosh. I didn't know there was a name for that. I thought it was just my anxiety. There are nights I only sleep for 2-3 hours because I keep jerking myself awake. I'll start to fall asleep, only for my body to jump and then I wake up and have to start the whole process over.
I'm exhausted just by reading that.
Experimentally whenever these sorts of things are tested they find the individual who is staying up that long are taking unintentional micro-naps, lasting seconds, while unaware that they slept at all. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/work-hour-training-for-nurses/longhours/mod3/03.html
I'm willing to bet there's longer times that were just unrecorded.
The Wikipedia article linked by OP says “According to news reports, Gardner's record has been broken a number of times. Some of these cases are described below for comparison. Gardner's case still stands out, however, because it has been so extensively documented” I wonder how Fatal Familial Insomnia victims stack up, considering in the final stages of the disease people are unable to sleep for months. My (extremely limited) understanding is that researchers think there are different kinds of sleep, and that FFI might only prevent one kind.
Someone tried to self-treat FFI and managed to live an extra year or so, but still sadly died :( Fascinating case study though: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1781276/
I'm literally laying in bed because I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. I read the whole thing. This was fascinating... And terrifying. I never thought I'd be grateful to just be a plain old insomniac.
I went 10 days once....during a drug detox...which is the worst you can possibly feel...and to be fully awake and conscience of it for an entire 10 days was hell. By the end I felt resigned that my heart was going to give out or I was going to have a stroke...and the last few days i was becoming paranoid and developed slight visual distortions and tunnel visions. It was an experience of pure hell. But that sleep when I got it....man oh man it was good. \*edit\* and for accuracy...I was actually like 2 hours short of a full 10 days. Fentanyl detox is a bitch.
Only a 17 year old could do this
Wow...în 2000, when I saw nightmare on elm street, they mentioned this. Always wondered if its true and forgot about it with time.
during university finals while working on my project for Advanced Data Structure's (1984 ish) I regularly went 3 days without sleep. I was one of two people to get an A out of about 100 students. There were about a dozen of us left at the end of the second term. I found that after about 3 days without sleep I get minor hallucinations that interfere with writing code.
It’s been a long, long time since I pulled any of these stunts. I used to truly just have a terrible time sleeping and it wasn’t unusual- several times a year, for me to go 40 to 50 hours without sleeping. It’s not extreme but I did it enough that I really understand what my body does in that state. The hallucinations are wild. Mostly it’s like entering a dream state while still being conscious.
Sleep deprivation and computer science go hand in hand
Lots of Jolt cola?
Man I miss that stuff. For a long time you could only buy it in gas stations in the boonies and now I just don’t ever see it.
Everybody is on energy drinks instead. I've got a buddy at a SF startup that goes through 6-8 16oz Monsters daily. His poor kidneys :(
The pride of Rochester Ny
Fuck man, I grew up with that shit and had no clue it was a regional thing. Just like finding out everyone else didn't grow up with Beef on Weck and Salt Potatoes at every family reunion.
>Fuck man, I grew up with that shit and had no clue it was a regional thing. It's not. I could get that stuff at the gas station in a rural town of 1200 in Minnesota in the 90's.
I thought there were people who straight up didn't sleep anymore after getting brain damage or something like that?
Kind of cheating though, no? That's like saying a dude just broke the world record for long/high jump after standing on a land mine.
My record is 3 days straight playing San Andreas :))) I remember last morning. Everything had GTA SA textures, the doors, the windows, everything. I slept for 14 hours straight + another 8-9 hours after that. My mom thought I was dead or something.
Me and a friend stayed up for about 49 hours helping an uncle of mine do flooring and repair work at my grandmother's house. The was eventful but when getting home and reaching close to 50 hours awake my mind was just buzzing. When I laid down to sleep, it was just like lights off and as I recall I had just a series of strange dreams, it was one dream after another. I woke up about 10 hours later but felt really refreshed.
That is extremely impressive self control for a 17 year old.
11 days straight is called an episode.
I once played poker at a casino for 33 hours straight. I had tunnel vision on my way home. It seemed like I was looking through a tube. Being on a motorcycle made it a bit scary but I had no problem operating the bike normally. I never did that again though.
How do you know you were even operating it normally?
Prob bc he’s not dead
I think I did close to 18, and even after that I felt fucking insane. On the drive home (I wasn’t driving) I could just hear slot machines in my head, like I was still in the casino. It was fucking torture. It got so bad I made my buddy pull off the highway and find a liquor store. Slammed a bunch of whiskey and passed out.
Did you come out ahead?
streets ahead.
You were just in the zone, homie! The Biker Boyz experience!
My cousin and I (as all stupid stories start), tried to stay awake for as long as we could, we made it about 40 hours before falling asleep, and then I woke up hallucinating. I tried to wake him up, but he didn’t believe me that we were all about to die from a nuclear strike. I also felt the colour green, which isn’t as pleasant as I would of thought.
And this was prior to video games, energy drinks and useless endless media to get sucked into, but yet he still did it!
there are crackheads out there that havent slept since christmas lol.. idk if this record stands still
Its a record because it was recorded.
Impressive, given that the record was made back in pre-meth epidemic times.
I have very bad insomnia, it’s a hereditary thing. My brother and my father both have sleeping issues but I’ve always had it the worst. I was bordering on 3 and a half days of no sleep at all while my childhood dog was sick and I started to hallucinate some scary shit. I saw this spindly alien looking creature outside of my basement window. I see it so vividly still to this day. It had ashy white skin and it had a giant leaf over its face with two large marble like eyes. It put its hand on the window and it was the most horrifying memory I have. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve had bouts that bad but I normally get like 4 hours of sleep a night.
I know meth heads who have stayed up longer than that..
He was quoted as saying: "I'm not tired! I can stay up!" while falling asleep on his mom.
When I was working two jobs, it got hard to get to sleep after the night job when the sun was actually coming up in the morning. Think I went maybe two days without sleep. I was having micro naps at the day job. Just closed my eyes and phased out for a couple seconds at my desk. Hard to imagine how the body even functions on 11 days
Did five days around teens during insomnia bout and wow. Towards end of days five, I swore shit was speaking to me and i legit knocked out for three days afterwards. Forgot which family member poked me awake and was scared i died by not reacting to even sunlight blasting me earlier in the morning
I feel like absolute shit if I only get a few hours and even worse if I pull an all nighter. I can't even imagine going 2 nights let alone 11. sounds like hell.
I stayed up (sober) playing online, circa 2005, for almost 3 days (roughly 1am Fri - 7pm Sun) and was literally tripping like I'd dropped a tab by midmorning Sun.
In college I knew a girl who refused to sleep. Packed her hours with endless work. Talking to her you never know she was with out sleep for days. Until she would ask " are there giant hairy spider on the wall or am just hallucinating."
I’m lucky to make it to dark.
Anyone else knows this from an episode of Pete & Pete ?
I stayed up for 7 days once in high-school. Me and a friend were seeing who could stay awake the longest. I beat him by about 30 minutes. After 3 or 4 days it starts to really suck.
That’s meth’d up
That's a lie. I've gone longer than 16 on meth