How Long Can You Survive Without Sleep?

The importance of our circadian rhythm

I often find myself rolling around in my bed, dreading the very thought of falling asleep. I’ll do anything to spend a few more hours partaking in an activity that will distract me from any notion of shutting my eyes. Besides, nighttime is when inspiration seems to kick me in the guts and yell use me just as my head meets the pillow.

But the evening gives out mixed vibes.

Some nights we might be determined to pursue that big project we’ve had at the back of our minds for a while now, while other nights we may feel so exhausted that entering a slumber is almost as effortless as opening our eyes in the morning.

This discrepancy in mood that befalls on us upon the dusk of the sun has me wondering: What if humans decided to outlaw sleep one day?

What if, one day, the act of sleeping got so unpopular that we were left with no choice but to scrap it off our to-do lists?

The Possibility of Not Sleeping for Days

In 1963, a teenage boy called Randy Gardner decided to undergo an experiment that would determine how long he could stay awake. By the end of the trial, it was found that he had successfully stayed awake for 11 days straight (the world record up to date). Well, successfully in terms of practice, that is.

In reality, he had garnered several side effects that he reported experiencing in the aftermath of those 11 days. During and following the experiment, he went through events of memory loss, hallucination, and a lack of appetite. Even though he was able to recover, this revelation caused people to accept the fact that sleep is meant to be an essential part of our daily routine.

But how much are we to be held accountable for our dependence on sleep? Well, a lot.

A Biological Instinct

You’ve probably heard of the role our circadian rhythm plays in making us aware that our time to sleep is approaching. When the moon makes it grand entrance and it gets dark, our physical interpretation of night arrives and the environment encourages us to plan our forthcoming sleep.

In other words, we have collectively identified night as the appropriate part of the day in which to allow our bodies to rest. But it’s not necessarily the case that evening was meant to be the time we go to sleep.

If practiced otherwise, we could easily turn morning into our time for sleep and evening into our time for being awake. Hence why a certain group of people known as night owls spend the peak of their days at dark and are compelled to sleep when the sun gives rise.

Such cases are evidently seen where people have jobs, lifestyle choices, or simply biological traits that allow them to switch the hours of the clock when it comes to their sleeping habits. In more rare cases, a number of people may have an irregular pattern of sleep, known as insomnia, wherein a deprivation of the necessary amount of hours needed to rejuvenate the body is not met and can cause long-term effects.

How Fit Are we to Neglect Sleep?

Apart from the environment, our own bodies are responsible for secreting sleep-inducing chemicals such as Adenosine and Melatonin that prompt us to feel tired and eventually fall asleep. The sleeping state allows our lymphatic system to clean up these by-products that build up throughout the day, which is due to the consumption of energy.

Therefore, sleeping allows us to repair our body cells and relax our muscles, replenishing us enough so we have the energy to face the next day. It is a way of recharging and reorganizing ourselves.

Adults are estimated to be requiring an average of 8 hours of sleep every day, while adolescents and children need at least 10 hours, even though the level of workload and pressure under the education system tends to oppose this requirement to some extent.

The human body is adapted to the need to rest when it has outperformed its level of energy. While avoiding sleep is possible, it has shown that attempts to prevent this biological need are just as harmful as preventing an intake of other needs, such as nutrition and hydration. A lack of sleep for prolonged hours has proven to result in instances of learning and memory faults, as well as mood and reaction swings.

Final Thoughts

Our years of living on the planet have caused us to develop certain survival tactics, one of them being the process of conserving and revitalizing our energy.

While we seem to have chosen nighttime as the moment to undergo that process, a number of us have also observed inconsistency in our ability to follow through, deciding to recharge ourselves at the light of day. Some of us have even witnessed a lack of participation in the process due to circumstances that simply do not allow us to enter a sleep-inducing state.

All set aside, however, one truth remains stable. Sleeping provides us with a supply of batteries for our bodies desperately seeking to be recharged. The amount of time we can handle a lack of recharging will probably depend on our individual consumption and conservation of energy.

If there is a fact that can be widely agreed on, it’s that sleep ought to be a part of our lifestyle if we would like to maintain a balance of health and sanity.

Thank you for reading.

Angelina Der Arakelian