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What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

outsideonline.com

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Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#311
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound exactly like how I felt before seeing a doctor about my insomnia. If you haven't already, I'd suggest just seeing a doctor, and asking for something that will help you sleep. I was given 50mg Trazodone, and I feel like it's saved my life. It's not a controlled substance, so doctors and nurse practitioners hand it out like candy. Now I get 8 hours of sleep a night, and most of the research I've dug up indica…

Trazodone seems like a might big hammer for this problem. Do you plan to take it forever? I’d assume that removing it will cause withdrawal and a reversion to your previous insomnia. Or did your doctor suggest a plan of taking it for X months and then taper off? While the idea of a pill to fix this problem sounds really appealing to me, taking an SARI is not without risk.

Some quick googling offers an interesting count point to my fear:

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/6/1768/3737867

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#312
post #311
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trazodone seems like a might big hammer for this problem. Do you plan to take it forever? I’d assume that removing it will cause withdrawal and a reversion to your previous insomnia. Or did your doctor suggest a plan of taking it for X months and then taper off? While the idea of a pill to fix this problem sounds really appealing to me, taking an SARI is not without risk.

Some quick googling offers an interesting count point to my fear: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/6/1768/3737867

An N of 6 study showing it doesnt just knock you out: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2211560

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#313
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point of view, but honestly I have a hard time consolidating the notion of being stress-free with the notion of making as much of an impact as I can. I want to be as productive as possible (when I'm not allotting necessary time for recreational activity, but my social activity is generally at a minimum) because of a driving fear over the future of earth and humanity. I have a deep urge to do as much…

What kinds of projects are you working on?

A lot of my energy still goes into the projects that feed me, but as I build after I build a nest egg there are many things I would like to increase my focus on.

For one I would like to break into the educational gaming sector. [0]

I've drafted and prototyped a few programs but haven't released anything substantial yet. Productivity and privacy tools mostly. Persona management utilities, a log utility I hope to eventually have distributed with most Linux distros, a (in my opinion) revolutionary social media platform which I'm still keeping quiet about for now.

I've recently finished drafting initial plans for a software suite which would allow you to maintain a private distributed data store and generate hashes which contain unique revocable keys in order to access and/or modify portions of this store. Websites/entities can be given these unique hashes in order to share information like reputation and private information under their own unique namespace, and other entities can be given access to (optionally fuzzed) fields from other namespaces. A Reputation API would provide entities a common way to provide cumulative updates to a person's reputation.

This could power services such as anonymized chat platforms based on reputation, distributed trustless online transactions, and hopefully a viable alternative to Cloudflare and Google reCAPTCHA. I want to work with websites like Reddit to reduce bot spam by implementing it. To move forward I'm just looking for a partner to aid me in technical writing (RFCs and such) and community management so I can start an open source collective around this idea because it's a lot of work.

I spend a lot of time leisure coding as well just for practice, picking up new technologies and stuff.

What about you, working on anything cool?

[0] My first experiment in this vein last year: https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#314
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stayed awake two nights in a row during college and, while I felt miserable and perhaps somewhat dilirious, I don't believe I had such disassociative effects. I could believe incoherent rambling after maybe 4 or 5 days, but that seems extreme for 2.

4 or 5 days? I'm not convinced a healthy person could make it that long. I've asked hundreds of classmates and grad students over the years for their records and have yet to meet anyone that claimed over 72 hours. Personally my body was almost completely non functional around 65 ish hours -- stumbling and slurring words, no concept of time, incapable of focusing. The only reason I was awake long enough to reach that…

I stayed awake for approximately 85 hours once -- in order to sit 18 hours of exams over three days at the end of the first year of my engineering & computer science degree.

I wasn't a very diligent student in my first year. (I spent most of it programming instead, and the internet was brand new to us as well. Both were addictive. So I ended up doing that instead of studying the degree materials.)

When the end of year exams came, I hadn't really done much revision.

The night before the first day of exams (6 hours of exams - two subjects, one in the morning, one in the afternoon), I decided to stay up and study for a change, which is what I did.

Lunchtime that first day was spent preparing for the second exam.

Phew, those went ok, then I realised I didn't know enough about the next day's subjects either, and did the same again.

And again the third day.

Amazingly, after the third day of exams (about 78 hours awake), when it was time to relax, I felt so relieved that I felt light and great. Went out to the pub with friends, and wasn't tired at all, which surprised me.

Slept quite normally that evening.

I can confirm, the hallucinations after multiple all-nighters are quite real. Dreams seem to keep trying to start up, speech is slurred, and things get strange. Yet somehow, in the midst of that, I was able to write adequate answers in difficult, long technical exams.

The hallucinations, and the slurring and reduced physical coordination, seem to go away in the "relaxed" phase after something is finished. It's like the relief makes a new wave of physical resources available to work with.

I've done a few highly-stressed all-nighters (and sometimes 2 or 3 nights in a row) since then (due to hard life events than bad planning on my part). I've also been up 4/5 nights (I can't remember which, it was a very stressful event), but got short (Although the exams 3 nights 4 days awake for exams was a kind of success, and it might seem like I must be one of those people who doesn't need much sleep, the opposite is true.

The longest time I've slept straight through, without waking (except for the usual wake-and-roll-over-back-to-sleep moments), was 25 hours. I'm sure, because I decided to find out when I was a student (a bit older than the above story). I knew that I slept a long time generally, and needed to if I was to feel rested, and that the timing was unpredictable. One day I decided to just sleep and sleep until I felt completely rested, and see how long that would be. So I did that, and it was 25 hours before I felt like I'd had all the sleep I could take. It felt pretty good, though waking at midnight, having gone to bed the evening of the day before, made me feel isolated.

I spend most of my life feeling rather tired, and I need about 9-11 hours sleep to feel good the next day (it varies but 10 feels like the average), but it's rarely achievable, for social and work pressure reasons, as well as difficult to predict insomnia. I've had fairly chaotic sleep "cycle" since the age of 15, which started due to staying up at night to do homework from school, and has never really recovered. By chaotic, for about 20 years (until ~35) most days it was unpredictable to me when I'd sleep and when I'd wake. Which as you can imagine, made work difficult.

Since 35 it's been more regular in that I sleep almost every night, although not always the same times. Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of it, and sometimes I won't get to sleep at all, despite everything being dark and quiet and comfy, and me being tired. If I get sleepy and think I'll sleep, I need to go to sleep or I risk missing the "window" of opportunity to fall asleep.

I would love to feel rested some day. I can't remember the last time I felt like I had a really good sleep and was fresh and rested the next day.

(ps. None of the above involved any drugs, not even legal ones, unless you count Coca Cola. I didn't even drink coffee in those days. Saying this upon seeing the other comments about speed/meth etc.)

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#315
post #291
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This action is intensely physical and disturbing Can you expand on that?

If you are very relaxed, but persistently unable sleep. But are not alarmed about not being able to sleep anymore, and in a state of almost like not thinking. You may suddenly experience a throbbing sensation in the head/neck, a pulsing in this state. Normally this enough to trigger alarm in the conscious and fully wake you up. But after this happens many times you can become expectant of it and just let it happen a…

I have experienced something that sounds like this, but during the first few minutes of falling asleep after a long time without.

Sometimes I woried that I was going to "pop a vessel", but after a couple of times, didn't worry so much.

Is it the same thing as you mean? I never experienced it "spontaneously", only while settling down to sleep before drifting off.

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#316

This is an amazing gem: > on the Monday after spring daylight saving time, when we lose an hour of sleep, there’s a 25 percent increase in heart attacks > Conversely, in the fall, when we gain an extra hour, there is a 21 percent reduction in heart attacks. So daylight saving kills an extra 4% people by heart attacks. Light Yagami approves. I wonder whether it's because of the sleep itself, or because when people don…

The article linked there ( https://www.acc.org/about-acc/press-releases/2014/03/29/09/1... ) is a bit more nuanced. The heart attacks are shifted from the rest of the week to Monday, looking at the week it is about the same as other weeks. (also, those heart attacks are not necessarily lethal)

> (also, those heart attacks are not necessarily lethal)

That sentence is not as comforting as I think you meant it to be.

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article linked there ( https://www.acc.org/about-acc/press-releases/2014/03/29/09/1... ) is a bit more nuanced. The heart attacks are shifted from the rest of the week to Monday, looking at the week it is about the same as other weeks. (also, those heart attacks are not necessarily lethal)

> (also, those heart attacks are not necessarily lethal) That sentence is not as comforting as I think you meant it to be.

I didn't mean it to be comforting, the other poster talked about Daylight Saving Time killing people, which is not a great way to talk about what is going on, it creates moderate pressure for cardiac events to happen earlier in the week it occurs.

I mean, I guess I do find it mildly reassuring, as I know a few people directly that have survived heart attacks, had cardiac bypass and then felt much better than they had for quite some time prior to the heart attack.

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how that feels, with camping as well. But I cannot shake the thought that most of our life is simply about survival. And society is a better alternative than hunting/farming on your own.

Sure, but is it a better alternative than hunting/farming in groups? I'm not convinced.

I've thought about this and come to the conclusion that the ambitious man/town/society down the road is the problem. You can hunt and gather all you want, but societies build technology and excess manpower and one day they will come along and ruin your day.

You see this to a lesser degree within society itself or even within a single workplace, where those few who are eager to over-extend with unpaid overtime ruin it for the rest of us!

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#319
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem too. I actually can't fall asleep because my brain keeps throwing out random ideas at me, like a toddler tugging at my sleeve: "is this solution good enough? no? How about this? No? What about this? No? This?" and so on and so on throughout the night.

Have you tried meditation?

I did. This sleep problem happens only if I try to work on a problem before bedtime. Otherwise, I'm OK.

Re: What Happens to the Body on No Sleep

#320
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great question. As others said, the data is contaminated. Likely people who are sick sleep a lot more. That said, I'm one of those people (healthy, I think) who sleeps 9-14 hours every day. My goal every night is to sleep as long as I possibly can. Nights when I only hit 9 hours is usually because I had to get up to go the bathroom. I have Sleep Apnea but treat it with a CPAP and went from 20 awakenings per…

How do you know you are healthy? Edit: This isn't meant to be accusatory, I'm just curious

No accusation taken.

Well, I'm not sure if my sleep is normal. That's for sure.

Other than Sleep Apnea, which has been treated to a large extent; I feel dramatically more rested after I began using a CPAP (best evidence) and my CPAP reads 0-2 awakenings per night (assuming it's accurate but not verified); although I'm not sure if it's been treated fully because I still need a lot more sleep than other people.

Other than Sleep Apnea, I have no health issues or problems and am very high functioning physically and mentally. I eat a healthy diet and regularly exercise.

So by those measures I think I'm healthy. But I am still in my early thirties.

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