What happen if you don't sleep ?

Question

I always was corious. What will happen if a person dosen't sleep , if stay awake much timie what will happen ? How will look , how will feel , how will behave ?

Strange question i know :). Sorry for my bad english.

Answer 1

I can tell you from personal experience that the human body can take a lot. I did not sleep for eight weeks. No nap, no mini sleeps, nothing. I was wide awake for eight weeks. After about the third or fourth week, you just don't feel tired anymore. I gained fifty pounds in that time although I ate almost nothing. I felt numb, was unable to think clearly, and today, almost seven years later, remember very little of that time. I always assumed that if the body got tired enough, it would sleep. That is a myth. I finally was put on some medication that caused my body to start sleeping for short periods of time and that made it better.
At one point around week six, I was just waiting for the fatal heart attack I knew was inevitable.
You do have some hullucinations, mostly involving light and movement that is not really there, but insanity? No. I could still carry on my life, but it all felt very unreal and disconnected..almost like you are outside your body, walking along beside it, and watching what is happening. You also get to a point where you don't really care what happens to you. Nothing really registers, and you don't really have any emotion..you end up looking at things that you would normally have strong reactions to and go "hmm,well, that's interesting"..nothing really makes an impression on your brain.
So, if you are not sleeping, really not sleeping, then you should try and see someone and get treated for it. It was no fun, and I still have a lot of problems sleeping and need to take medication because I am at risk of it happening again.

Answer 2

Look? Very tired and sleepy.
Feel? Very tired and sleepy. After a while, the person will start to suffer from hallucinations...basically, they "dream while awake".
Behave? Very tired and sleepy. They may say or do some strange things, mainly because of the hallucinations mentioned above.

I have heard that prolonged periods of sleeplessness can be fatal, but I don't have any confirmation of that. We'd be talking at least 200 hours of continuous non-sleep for this to happen. Personally, I suspect that death would come from some other cause.

I have monitored a person who stayed awake for nearly a week. Other than what I mentioned above, there was nothing special about his appearance or behavior.

Answer 3

When my husband left me last year, I barely slept for about 6 weeks straight. This caused me to hear and see things that weren't really there and develop a keen sense of paranoia. At one point I had an episode of total psychosis and ended up running away and hurting myself, but I wasn't really aware of what I was doing. The police found me and I was sent in an ambulance to the psych ward of a hospital. Once there, I was put on medication in combination with having intense therapy. A year and a half later I am still on meds, but am no longer in therapy. One of the meds I am on has a side effect of making you sleepy, so I take it at night and am able to sleep rather peacefully. I've have cut out of my life all activities that would take away me getting to bed on time. I make sure that I get at least 8 hours of sleep per night during the week, and on weekend I get about 10 hours. I also don't drive late at night when I'm tired under any circumstances. Sleep deprivation is one of the worst things that can happen to you and I am determined to never let it happen to me again.

Answer 4

after three days without any sleep at all a person is considered legally insane. i'm not making this up. if you continue without any sleep at all, you'd just die. don't know how long it would take, though... you can't survive without sleep.

once when i was sick i was on a lot of drugs and could not fall asleep for four nights straight. i literally slept a total of about an hour over the course of these 4 days. it was almost like an out-of-body experience. like i wasn't me. i could feel my body going through actions and i knew i was doing them, but i felt like i was behind a cloud all the time. i cried constantly and thank god i was sick and in bed because i could not have functioned normally.

Answer 5

Do a web search on sleep depravation. You can go psychotic if you don't sleep, start hallucinating and/or become deluded and manic.

Answer 6

they will become zombie like, hallucinate, and not be able to function normally. Your body has to have sleep in order to replenish itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation

Answer 7

Also, your immune system will begin to brake down, opening up a can of worms....