• Question: if i stayed awake for 5 days what would happen to me?

    Asked by jollyjones to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by howyilms1.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      You might die.

      No, but seriously, sleep deprivation can do serious things to your health so don’t try it. Your brain would start going very weird as it really needs sleep, all the chemicals in your body would go out of balance and it wouldn’t be very pleasant.

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I had to stay awake all night once when I was in Sweden working on an experiment – I felt terrible afterwards. I definitely would not survive 5 days without sleep.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I don’t think you’d be able to. Scientists don’t completely understand sleep, and why we need to dream and why we have deep sleep, but there is certain amount of sleep you need and without it your body reacts very badly.

      If you are woken up in the middle of deep sleep, you can feel quite sick, and scientists did some experiments where they woke mice up every time they got into deep sleep, and after less than a week they died…

      Some people have tried to train their bodies into sleeping for an hour every four hours or so, so they don;t have to sleep for a long time at night. Nobody has been able to keep this up for more than a few weeks though, as far as I know.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      I think you’d be very tired. And I’d be surprised if you managed it – they use it as torture sometimes I’ve heard. Especially for new parents….. 😉

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      You would start to get confused, find it hard to walk, feel dizzy, probably throw up. In other words, it would be a really bad idea.

      There is an awful, but very rare disease, where people stop being able to sleep. They do, eventually, die.

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