You Should Watch Your Newly Found Love of Sleep Deprivation

The height for me is having to go without sleep for 48 hours and this was because I had a lot of things to finish up that day, and when I was going to sleep, I slept like I hadn't had one in years. It is was long sleep to dreamland, and it was one I enjoyed but that said, there are a few people who like to cheat nature and go extreme not to sleep for a long time thereby depriving themselves of sleep and interesting enough, a lot of them have been able to tell the story, so let's discuss what happens when a person deprives themselves of sleep for a long time.

People do different things for different reasons, and for New York City DJ Peter Tripp, it was to raise money for an NGO in the year 1959, with the name March of Dines by depriving himself of sleep for 200 hours to help alleviate financial struggles to treat infants with birth defect and infant mortality. He had two psychologist who were to monitor him through out the process and they tried to talk him out of it but he wasn't going to listen.

When he began the wake-a-thorn, he was quite awake and very much alive just like everyone who just woke up to a peaceful morning but as the day went by, his smile was replaced with a scowl after which it was replaced gradually by facade looking face. Days past and he started to see things as he was hallucinating as he began to see mice and kittens (cat and mouse) running around the studio, you know that Tom and Jerry cartoon chasing.

It didn't end there, he was really seeing things and mistaking people like when he was seeing a random person who came to watch him as an undertaker who was going to embalm him, or when his saw table in his office catch fire. Through out the period of the wake-a-thorn, he was given stimulants to keep him. He was able to finish the wake-a-thorn at 201 hours but his life would never be the same. If it were someone like me, I would be scared to sleep so my organs do not shutdown as a result of overworking (lol).

Sleep is important no doubt and for someone like myself who usually have an all round trip to the toilet at night, it often looks like I am not enjoying my night sleep but how much sleep is enough? Well, I would say 8 hours but according to the United States National Sleep Foundation, the sleep length for individuals reduce as they grow older. For instance, Newborn children to those up to a year can sleep within 12 hours and 17 hours a day while teenagers would sleep for around 8 to 10 hours daily but in adults, the sleep can be between 7 to 9 hours to work at optimum capacity and for good sleep.

Because I said you should sleep properly doesn't mean that you (I mean you Scot) should over sleep because when you do, you might experience fatigue, irritability, and lethargy because it has been associated with them but this doesn't mean that everyone who oversleeps does it for the fun of it, this is not true because consistent depression which also causes the symptoms I mentioned when a person oversleeps can also lead to oversleeping itself.

If you like, say because I said you shouldn't oversleep you now started the 3 hour sleep a day, you might find yourself at the hospital soonest because lack of proper sleep has been associated with numerous health issues like obesity, diabetes, and different cardiovascular disease and so you know, oversleeping can cause the same so just do it in moderation (That's a lot to handle because you need to start moderating your sleep too amongst the numerous things you are trying to moderate).

Charles (I means you), do you know that staying awake for up to 24 hours will give you the same effect with a person with blood alcohol content of 0.10% which is higher than the required 0.08% blood alcohol content (BAC) for ascertain a person as drunk? I was certain you were not familiar with that because if you were you would be sleeping properly. You would experience effects like daytime sleepiness, crankiness, trouble sleeping, and trouble hearing when you do not sleep for over 24 hours.

When you stay awake for over 36 hours, coupled with the effect you must have been experiencing, your body begins to release the Cortisol Hormone which is the fight or flight hormone leading to short term memory fading, decreased energy level, impaired decision making skill, and difficulty formulating thoughts and speech. Oh! Patrick, do not try this as a wake-a-thorn for Guinness World Records but there is no way you can try it because Guinness already cancelled such endurance since it affects sleep.

When you go for 2 days which is about 48 hours, you begin to lose touch of things happening around you, a you will be detached from your environment. This is the point when your immune system begin to operate less efficiently and you might begin to experience micro sleep sessions because that would be the only thought on your mind. If you are able to push it to about 3 days, then you will begin to experience increased heart rate, and inability to control emotions. At this point, you will be easily irritated and anything can trigger you. This is the point when you begin to see your supposed ancestors, or you begin to see the sun talking to you. While you might think you have had super powers in the process, you didn't instead you were just hallucinating.

If this deprivation continues for a long time, organs can begin to fail, and it can also lead to death because the body would want to rest but the case of death is still not yet confirmed because there have been no reported case of a person dying as a result of sleep deprivation and in recent time, most studies haven't gone past three days for ethical purposes.

Talking about why it might be difficult to attribute death from sleep deprivation to it is because there will be secondary issues that would lead to the death and not the sleep deprivation itself but sleep deprivation would possibly be the trigger for the secondary issue. To understand what I just wrote, a study was done by the University of Chicago on mice where they were starved for 32 days, and all the rats died. At the end of the research, debates arose to the cause of death with some mentioning that the data from the research mentioned bacterial infection on the rats as a result of poor immune response, another set looked at stress level on the brain led to the damage of the brain, and some argued they died of hypothermia.

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^{Post Reference}

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^{https://study.com/learn/lesson/peter-tripp-sleep-deprivation-experiment.html
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/the-stay-awake-men/
https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/ijmh/23/1/article-p95.xml
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/05/can-you-die-from-lack-of-sleep.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3755488/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267703/
https://amerisleep.com/blog/oversleeping-the-health-effects/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4165901/
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/27/573739653/the-haunting-effects-of-going-days-without-sleep
https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-die-from-lack-of-sleep}

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^{Image Reference}

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^{Image 1 || Flickr || 9/365 Sleep Deprivation
Image 2 || Wikimedia Commons || 100wikidays-sleep-deprivation-bw-red.jpg
Image 3 || Flickr || International Sleep Day II}