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The Dangers of Being Really, Really Tired
Sleepy Dog Millionare writes "Brian Palmer, writing for Slate, asks 'Can you die from lack of sleep?' and shockingly, the answer may very well be Yes, you can. Palmer points to 'ground breaking experiments' in the area of sleep research. It turns out that sleep deprivation can actually be deadly in rats. The obvious conclusion is that it is probably deadly in all mammals. So the next time you think you need to pull multiple all-night hack-a-thons, ask yourself if it's worth risking your life for."
It's not the voluntary all-night hack-a-thons that society needs to worry about. It's the insistence by employers that their staff work all night, because of deadline screwups by management, or by the requirement that staff have to do on-call, rather than employing people specifically for night shifts.
I wouldn't lose any sleep at all, if it wasn't for idiotic decisions by my employer.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Wasn't this already proven by several cases of Chinese "volunteers" who stayed up for days playing Counterstrike in lan centers?
Also, there's usually a reason why your body makes you do things. Sleep is a method of biological maintenance, as is pooping. This is so obvious that I'm offended that rats had to die for this "experiment".
I remember reading some time ago (in the 1970's) of some research that was already old then (1950's?), about sleep deprivation literally killing cats. (Who would do such research is not clear, but looking back on things I suspect a military connection.)
This must be available in some public archive, if anyone cares to hunt for it.
Years ago I was working on a project to export data from a fancy survey instrument. After working at my office all day, I started work on the survey project in my basement around 5pm on a Friday night and worked on it for a while and had a wonderful time and everything was coming together nicely. After a while I suddenly felt sick; thought I might have to lie down or something. I then noticed that it was about 7pm on Sunday night. I hadn't noticed until then. That's why I was suddenly sick.
It's one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. I subsequently felt much better after having a meal and a nap.
I guess that if something is sufficiently interesting and so on, you won't notice that you haven't had any sleep for quite some period of time.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
It may, depending on what you're doing. Being deprived of sleep (or stoned) is the only way I can even contemplate boring tasks -- decorating for example. If I'm capable of doing something... anything that's even vaguely interesting then boring tasks are going to be put off.
If you need to be in any sort of altered state of mind to function, then you have deeper problems. I don't buy into all of that bullshit ADD crap, but perhaps you should get more exercise and eat healthier. It might help more than you know.
I once went 9 days without sleep. After 22 hours of sleep I woke up in severe pain, as an injury I had suffered halfway through, which seemed very mild in my sensory-depressed state, was in fact something that required medical attention. If it had been only a tiny bit worse, I could have developed life-threatening complications after several days of ignoring and aggravating it. Impaired motor control, pain sensitivity, awareness, and judgment, all at the same time, is a dangerous combination.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
In my early thirties I started snoring a lot, and very heavily. Two years later I started experiencing symptoms such as forgetting where I was going as I driving down the road, getting into my vehicle and not remembering how to start it, forgetting my own phone number, the inability to perform my job at any level of competency, etc.... I thought I had suffered a major stroke.
I went to the doctor and he said I was a ringer for sleep apnea and referred me to a sleep clinic.
Long story short I was waking 50 times an hour because that's how often my breathing was being interrupted and my body would rouse me due to low oxygen levels in my blood. To me it seemed as if I was awake all night long and never went to sleep.
After being fitted with a cpap mask and sleep machine to pump air into my mouth and nose while I slept it took me three weeks of normal sleep to recover my mental faculties.
Sleep deprivation will kill you, and it will also seriously degrade your mental capabilities. It's nothing to mess around with. In addition to the mental problems the probability of a stroke or heart attack is greatly amplified.
I guess this is something to think about when you are being wheeled into the emergency room and meet your doctor who has been up for 30 hours. See http://www.ergoweb.com/news/detail.cfm?id=1190.
When I was younger I'd sometimes go as much as a week without sleep. It does make a difference in how you solve problems. With massive sleep deprivation problems requiring critical thinking become harder but problems requiring creative leaps get easier. You end up in something close to a waking dream state. I wouldn't suggest it for average problems but if you get really stuck on something that is very complex it can help.
Of course most problems of this nature can be solved by just relaxing in a quiet place for a while and letting your mind wander. There is something to different states of mind but it's best not to abuse these. With practice you can slip into the right state of mind at will without needing to force it with drugs, lack of sleep, etc.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Gotta say that was a very long post that repeated a lot of conventional wisdom but said almost nothing to answer OP's question...
"What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep?"
From a neurobiological perspective that will not be answered satisfactorily until we know at a basic biochemical level what happens during sleep to "recharge" the brain to its normal function.
Let me be the first to call shenanigans on this.
Any studies on the harmfulness of sleep deprivation are so horribly confounded as to be practically useless.
The problem lies in the fact that in order to deprive rats of sleep you have to apply some kind of aversive stimulus to disrupt their sleep. Not only that, but the more tired an animal gets, the stronger the aversive stimuli needed to keep them awake. These aversive stimuli cause stress, and we already know that chronic, unavoidable stressors can kill.
So how can they make the attribution to lack of sleep rather than to stress? There's no simple way to separate them.
One of the articles even states that one of the physiological results of lack of sleep is an increase of cortisol and TSH - *BOTH* of which are known effects of stress. I would rather say that the physiological results they are seeing have been caused by the stressors they are applying to keep the animals awake than the lack of sleep.
Shenanigans I say, shenanigans.
No, I am not being unfair, and no he didn't answer the question (unless you think making up an answer qualifies).
First, he said "I think" - what kind of scientific qualification is that?
Second, he claimed "lack of REM sleep can result in actual brain damage" - which has not been proven anyway.
Third, you have even stated he didn't say anthing about the original question that specifically used the word, well... "specifically"! What about any of it was specific, even if it wasn't vague pop science and making wrong conclusions?
In fact, I wasn't meaning to be THAT harsh - a log of this statements as regards to REM sleep have been borne out by research - but mostly statements that can be quoted from a wikipedia article, inexplicably mixed in with a few things that are totally unproven. But I guess that's the /. way...
Funnily enough...
Calorie Restricted Diet
Calorie restriction, or caloric restriction (CR), is a dietary regimen thought to improve health and slow the aging process in some animals and fungi by limiting dietary energy intake below the average needs. CR is the only dietary intervention which has been documented to increase both the median and maximum lifespan in a variety of species, among them rodents, yeast, fishes and dogs. The life extension is varied, for mice and rats there is a 30-40% increase [1].
My guess is that it's the biological equivalent of defragging a hard disk, or perhaps a memory management garbage cleaning routine. Imagine how poorly computers run if they go too long without doing either of those too long. Sometimes one of those things can lead to system freezing or even a BSOD. (The biological equivalent is either entering a catatonic state or keeling over dead.)
So why wouldn't a biological system need time to do internal housekeeping and optimization? It's likely these functions need processing power to work in a reasonable time (about 5 to 8 hours for a human) and all other functions are made idle to make it happen. It may even involve the nerve cells doing stuff for their own metabolism because they were too busy pushing data for the rest of the body during awake time, now there's a big pile of homeostasis type stuff to catch up on.
As for greedy-fuck employers that push people beyond normal hours? You're just asking for mistakes or accidents to happen. It may help for a short term deadline, but don't be surprised at all if you end up with bugware, damaged workplace equipment, or a much inferior quality end product. Let your employees get well rested (within reason) and they'll be much more effective the next day. Also management should be prepared to eat the results of scheduling problems, since they're the ones that made it in the first place.
Lovely dreams, dramatic nightmares, improved performance, elevated mood, enhanced creativity and better health.
If someone tells you they only sleep 6 hours per night, you can bet their either lying or deteriorating.
After I got married and my daughter got beyond infancy, I started knocking off a little earlier in the evening and getting at least eight hours of sleep per night. I have found, to my great delight, that I have much more energy than I did when I was 25 and staying out 'til "last call" every night. I also learned that I can be more productive between 6am and 9am than I used to be all day.
But one of the best benefits to longer sleep is the growth of my dream life. Because I reliably remember my dreams now, I've learned to have lucid dreams and have come to really look forward to even the most horrific nightmares. For some reason, I've found that when I have one of those crazy, terrifying dreams where I practically wake up screaming, clasping the bedpost or pillow, I have particularly good days afterward.
Maybe this is because I make a living in the arts and imagination, lucidity and other right-brain activities are my stock in trade, but I've got non-artist friends who saw the change in me and have started getting a little more sleep and they've seen dramatic improvements too.
I think the key to this change, though, may have been getting married and having a happy marriage. I don't have the need to be out late every night in a desperate search for pussy. I used to be always looking for "something" without really knowing what (or who) it was. Now, most everything I'm looking for in life is either at home or in my head.
If your job requires you to give up sleep, you have to be aware that you're paying a very high price and you might not notice that price until your body (or mind) complains to you in an unpleasant way. Lost sleep is not something you can easily retrieve.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's very true. Remember back in the late '70's / early '80's when Saccharine was banned? Ever wonder why it's sold now?
The Saccharine ban was based on lab rat tests that indicated that rats that were fed huge amounts of Saccharine had an increased incidence of cancer.
Later, animal researchers learned that rats are genetically predisposed to cancer. Almost all rats that die naturally die of cancer. So an increase in incidents likely was, in reality, only an acceleration of their genetic fate. And that fate is pretty hard to superimpose upon humans, or even mammals.
So the started selling Saccharine again, and pretty much stopped testing the effects of Product X with respect to cancer on rats.
http://digg.com/general_sciences/Man_in_Vietnam_hasnâ(TM)t_slept_in_33_years._2
It won't pull up the story right now but I recall reading it. Apparently he got some illness and it led to some very specific brain damage, (by fever?) and prevented him from ever being able to sleep again. The article said he used the nighttime over the course of several years to dig a pond to raise fish to supplement the family's income. You'd think this guy would be the subject of intense research by a variety of groups, civilian and military alike?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
True, the context of the original article on Slate was the "enhanced interrogation techniques" practiced by the US on captured terrorists. According to the recently released memos interrogators were allowed to deprive subjects of sleep for up to 180 hours (7.5 days). The starting technique was to shackle them in a standing position so that if they fell asleep, their entire weight was born on their arms. After forty hours they had to shackle them lying down to avoid permanent damage to their circulatory system. I haven't read how they kept them awake while lying down, but I think we can assume they had sufficient resources and "creativity" to accomplish it. Definitely not a normal circumstance, but not just of academic interest either.
If sleep is just an energy saving state, why can't I just ingest more energy to make up for it? What's so special about sleep that we need it? That was the question noone has answered yet.
I've had some similar experience. One semester in college, I had a terrible schedule - almost all my classes were before lunch. The previous semester, I had gotten used to staying up very late since my I didn't have a single class before 2 PM. When I decided to try and stay up late, and then just take a nap in the afternoon, my grades in calculus, history, and physics suffered. But my creative writing class I did very well in. My computer science class was an even split - I came up with some very well-optimized code, but my documentation was horrible, and sometimes by the time I met up with the rest of the group to get all the modules working together, I couldn't even remember how it did what it did.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I'm on first name basis with my sleep doctor. And why not? I put his kids through college. According to him, REM sleep is pretty much garbage sleep - you don't need it at all. In fact there are some drugs that suppress that stage of sleep, and they seem to have no effect on overall well being. Sleep doctors have quantified four different stages of sleep based on EEG readouts, and it turns out what you must have is a few hours of stage 4 sleep, though what that means beyond being the deepest kind of sleep I'm not sure. I can tell you from personal experience lack of stage 4 sleep causes all sorts of problems, from hypertension to memory loss to anxiety attacks.
It's a bit off topic, but if you're suffering from anxiety attacks make sure you get a sleep study done before you go on an SSRI. You could save yourself a whole lot of heartache.
You're only slightly wrong, as in 3 of 3.
ka - over, excessive
rou - labor, work
shi - death,
all borrowed from our Chinese overlords.
In glorious Japanese, here: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%81%8E%E5%8A%B4%E6%AD%BB
As a grad student I talked with an assistant in a sleep research lab studying the effects of sleep deprivation in rats. The rats had electrodes implanted in their skulls which were used to monitor wakefulness as they were rocked back and forth in a cylindrical cage. Whenever they fell asleep the cage would rock back and forth, waking them up. I was told that experiments of this sort could only be done over 72 hours (after which time the rats had their heads chopped off and flash frozen for later brain slicing) or, based on previous research, they would be likely to die (from lack of sleep rather than the guillotine). I assume that this was not a new discovery. Perhaps the new part is actually trying to kill rats through lack of sleep and keeping track of how long it takes to do so.
In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.
My own experience has been that a mild level of sleep deprivation increases my productivity since my mind is less resistant to menial tasks. However, and this is very important, when sleep deprived, my rate of learning is much lower. My experience is that when I'm sleep deprived it's my ability to form memories that suffers.
Since ultimately your effectiveness depends much more on how well you've learned than your current mental state, being well rested is of far more value than people give it credit for.
I agree with some of your statements, but a lot of your rant was (dis)coloured by the typical attitude of 'Foreigner in Japan' syndrome: which is that the Japanese way is not the same as my way, therefore it is inferior.
Many of my gaijin acquaintances in Japan do nothing but complain about the place, yet whenever I ask them if they've forgotten the correct route to the airport, they clam up and don't speak to me for a while.
Almost all of them came to Japan for at least one of the four main reasons foreigners (who are almost always male) come here.
1. They believe that in Japan they will at last be Big Men, physically, and not average-below average men, as they feel they are in their home country, because "all Japanese men are midgets".
2. They believe that in Japan they will be treated like movie/rock stars, women will throw themselves at them, and the president of Sony/Hitachi/Corp X will beg them to sign on and "show them how to do it".
3. As per reason 2. they believe that Japanese women accept it as their place in life to be shockingly mistreated by men, and that males in Japan are expected to have, oh, I don't know, let's say a wife and four girlriends.
4. They couldn't cut it in the west, so they come to Japan thinking they'll earn a fortune teaching English (with absolutely no formal ESL qualifications and experience), and that reasons 1-3 will also apply.
One of the reasons gaijin in Japan complain incessently about Japan is because they very quickly discover that 1-4 are all grossly incorrect, and they usually discover it the hard way.
Have you ever read a book called 'Notes from Toyota-land' by Darius Mehri? He came to Japan believing he would be a God amongst short people, mostly because he could speak Japanese, but also because he assumed westerners were heroes in this country.
When he discovered that his presumptions were incorrect, he wrote a book whining about how the Japanese do everything "the wrong way" and wept like the little bitch he is because nobody fawned all over him for being a westener who could speak some Japanese.
If you don't like the Japanese way, if it's "not as good as your way", you have two options: shuttup and live with the "fact", or fuck off back to your own country.
Note: I'm a 6'5" westerner with a Japanese wife (met and married her outside Japan, had two kids), and have lived and worked in Japan for a couple of years (as just another corporate drone), and understand that 99.999% of Japanese would be happy to see me and all other foreigners leave Japan forever, mostly because 99.9% of gaijin fall into motivational categories 1-4.
Wierd.. I've only once stayed awake for a whole week.. After 3 days, I started getting auditory hallucinations, after 5, that included visual. Most of the work I was on at that point was next to useless, and there was no guarantee that what went into my head actually made it intact to the paper I was writing on.
Once I'd had sleep after it, and pieced together what I was trying to do and made sense of it all, I salvaged most of it, but hey.. Not a good way to work.
The stresses on the system left me feeling not in such a good way for some time..
Personally, I'd not recommend it for any problem that you wouldn't try to solve by popping a tab of acid.
In fact, I seem to recall a study claiming that 6.5 hours of sleep per day is considered optimal, at least with respect to longevity.
I do just fine with some 6 hours of sleep on average, and have done so for the best part of my life. Even my parents say I've always slept less than normal kids, and much less than my sister, who on one occasion slept for 23 hours, got up for an hour, then went back to sleep.
BTW she's doing just fine, too, though now that she has a daughter, she does not tend to sleep much.
My only annoyance is that I tend to drop off somewhere between 11 pm and 1 am, then sleep until around 6 am, while my girlfriend goes to sleep around 4 am and then sleeps till noon.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Yeah, I agree with the other response to this post. I used to be a druggie myself, until one day I finally quit and began putting my life back together. The most I ever did was pot, but even that is enough to harm you. You may say it is safe, it doesn't kill you or cause cancer, but the truth is altering your state of mind isn't good.
I have found being in a clear state of mind these past five years has accelerated my learning and retention more so than doing drugs ever did. I mean, looking back at it now I wish I didn't waste so much time on smoking pot and seeking the next drag, I could have been doing a lot more useful stuff.
There have been experiments done with CR in humans. The one that got probably the most coverage was the Biosphere 2 experiment.
For those who don't know, Biosphere 2 was (is) a huge closed structure in which a closed ecological system was created, and they put a crew of eight inside. They were on a CR diet. Furthermore, itt turned out that they couldn't produce enough food so the R in the CR got even bigger. While they all experienced hunger, it turned out that all their health indicators were excellent and, in fact, better than before the start of the experiment.
Naturally, this doesn't conclusively prove anything, but the basic premise behind it seems logical (the less your engine burns, the longer it's gonna last) and it shows that not all of it is just extrapolation from animal experiments.
Personally, I'd still have my steaks and bacon instead of another couple of decades, thank you very much.
I've wondered how much the side effects of sleep deprivation change between different people. I would guess that I'm more sensitive to these side-effects than most - I start getting minor auditory hallucinations after being awake for 16+ hours (not much more than a normal day), and visual effects about 20+ hours in. But then I don't think I could survive more than a couple of days, I hit a really hard brick wall at about 40 hours and can't stay awake. By that stage I've already gone through the temperature changes that they describe in the article.
Although it is a hellish way to work there is something to be said for not having to pick up context repeatedly in a problem. A 24-hr stretch in the office seems to produce about as much work as a standard 40-hr week.
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This can be true for you and if so that is great. I thought like that as well when I stopped smoking weed. The truth is though, there are many people who do just fine. I know directors in large companies, (fortune 15) who smoke and they do very well. It admit it is not for everyone because I hit a wall like you one day and cannot do it anymore. I cannot fathom being stoned and trying get things done. I just try to be aware that what works for me doesn't necessarily work for others.
All points of time and space are connected.
This is exactly why good bands start to suck after a few albums. If they get successful they get comfortable. At least that is my theory.....
All points of time and space are connected.
I'm currently in architecture school, and the expectation at both of the universities I have attended is to stay up all night for days at a time, especially during mid-reviews and final reviews. As for whether it increases creativity, it certainly does up to a point. A small anecdote, if I may be allowed: During my second year in architecture school I had a professor that gave us absurd amounts of work above and beyond that of the other studio sections. Her justification? So that we would learn work ethics even if it meant staying up all night. She even had a definition for the all-nighter. According to her, if we had time to go home and take a shower, it was not a true all-nighter. The other thing I can say is that this semester, now in grad school half-way across the country, the all-nighter is just a prevalent or more so. It's the nature of architecture school. I ended up sleeping for 2-3 hours a day for almost two weeks towards the end of the semester, and eventually, with enough sleep deprivation you become despondent, and its time to put your head down or go home and get some rest so you can actually be productive. Both of these cases were somewhat extreme. There have been tales on various architecture forums of schools trying to ban all-nighters, but the expectations of perfection, extreme amounts of production, and a project constantly in flux never go away, so the all-nighter won't either. Even at Georgia Tech which touts its 24 hour access to the architecture building and its resources (even parts of the wood shop), the administration gets nervous when people move cots and couches into the building. I think I've ranted enough on the subject, but if anyone wants to start a thread, lets do it.
After spending a year or so staying awake for 5 days at a time almost every week I can tell you that you can get used to it... for me hallucinations started around the 4 day point, by the end of that year they wouldn't kick in until I'd been awake nearly six days.
You do start to hallucinate and become paranoid and unreasonable. Not especially fun. If you are abusing caffeine it is even worse. It's certainly not a good way to work most of the time. I'll agree that it might be something like popping a tab of acid. You get very creative but it will make you very unstable. As I have a family now I try not to get this sleep deprived and I avoid caffeine.
I sometimes have sleep-walking like coding sessions where I produce amazing tricks of code but when you read the code it is almost impossible to figure out why it works. I'd put it on par with trying to figure out why a neural net or genetic algorithm has produced what it has.
I used to do a lot of work with artificial intelligence and methods of indexing and searching massive stacks of information. These problems were usually very non-linear and complex so they weren't something you could just sit down and plan out what logic needed to happen. Code produced while sleep-coding or massively sleep deprived sometimes did stuff I just couldn't explain but it was very interesting and sometimes had results I've not seen duplicated.
The code produced is just bizarre though. It has weird names and is often very much spaghetti code. Sometimes it seems to be inside out. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.