Ivy Roller

Can a person actually die from sleep deprivation?  I’m not referring to the ‘only getting 2-3 hours a night’ variety.  I already know from my own experience that variety can be sustained indefinitely.  I’m asking if there is an actual threshold in existence—any reputable research that can offer the total number of hours or days a person can maintain consciousness before involuntarily passing out, thereby ensuring their survival?  Or does the continuous state of uninterrupted wakefulness—I mean never sleeping, not even for a minute—cause the gradual degradation of the body’s organs, eventually resulting in massive system failure and death?  It’s been 4 days since I’ve slept, yet I don’t really feel that bad, I mean in the pure sense of simply feeling tired.  It’s not that I don’t want to sleep, it’s just that I’ve been so busy that I have just not bothered going to bed.  Maybe it’s because that “second wind” finally kicked in, and I just don’t notice it.  I know I could dodge at least one more night of sleep, as I really want to finish working on most of the stories I began writing while still hypomanic.  It has been a rather long process due to both the sheer volume of pages written, but also because there are several instances where something I’ve written doesn’t make sense or where my handwriting is illegible.

I took a short break and did some searching.  As I suspected, a person can certainly go without ANY sleep for an extended period of time.  The Guinness Book of World Records in its 1978 edition stated that: “The longest recorded period for which a person has voluntarily gone without sleep is 449 hr (14 days 13 hours) by Mrs. Maureen Weston of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire in a rocking chair marathon on 14 Apr.-2 May 1977.”  The Guinness Book of Records has, however, since withdrawn its backing of a sleep deprivation class because of the associated health risks.  That doesn’t surprise me.  There is an abundance of medical opinions available, but no unequivocal evidence that sleep deprivation can actually be fatal in and of itself.  People often cite Fatal Familial Insomnia as basically death due to lack of sleep.  But insomnia is completely different from sleep deprivation.  Simply put, insomnia is trying to sleep and not being able to.  The whole difficulty in falling asleep and difficulty in staying asleep resulting in only getting a few hours of sleep per night crap.  That is not the same thing as going without any sleep at all, and doing it purposefully, which is the definition of sleep deprivation.  From what I’ve been able to find out, results of experiments using completely sleep deprived rats indicate that very prolonged sleep deprivation could result in death in two to three weeks, but this has never been observed in humans.  So my question remains without a definitive answer.

That twisted side of me thinks it would be interesting to find out just exactly how long I could voluntarily go without sleep.  Why?  I think Amelia Earhart said it best: “I want to do it because I want to do it.”

Filed under: Observations by cindy