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."

Comments

If I were sleep deprived

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be able to get a first post.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wish people would take the dangers of even small amounts of sleep deprivation more seriously.

Even missing an hours sleep could be enough to kill some poor sod who happens to be crossing the road at the same time as you miss the red lights.

In the modern world it seems to be macho to go without sleep. In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[Anonymous Coward]

depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive

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.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[Anonymous Coward]

In the modern world it seems to be macho to go without sleep.

Stop talking like a pussy, boy!

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[Thiez]

> In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.

In reality, there's more to life than being 'at optimal productivity level' all the time. Work to live, not the other way round. If you have an awesome party on your birthday but are a little less productive the day after, then the world can just suck it up. I'm not saying you should drive while (severely) sleep deprived, it's just that there are many things in life that are worth a little sleep deprivation. Just make sure you understand the consequences of sleep deprivation and use that knowledge to act responsibly.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[Shikaku]

There's a whole new meaning to being dead tired...

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[MikeFM]

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.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[smallfries]

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.

Re:If I were sleep deprived

[MrPippers]

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.

Ah......

[Anonymous Coward]

But did they feed the rats Jolt?

It keeps me alive!

Now if I can just do something about those damned bats...

Re:Ah......

[jd2112]

Red Bull gives you Wiings.

Too much Red Bull gives you Wings, And a halo.

Hack-a-thons? No.

[The Fanta Menace]

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.

Re:Hack-a-thons? No.

[paitre]

Actually, there are some Really, Really good reasons for certain individuals to be 'on-call'. However, the result of on-call actions should have the commensurate benefit of having additional time off to recover from those over night sessions.

If THAT happened more often, people would be far more willing to do on-call.

SRSLY.

Re:Hack-a-thons? No.

[Hurricane78]

Hmm. The real problem is, that you can not go somewhere else when stuff like that happens. Usually they all are that way. And usually they can just reject you and not care, while you can not do the same.

That's why unions came up. Unfortunately it turned out being something not exactly as good as intended. ^^

Try a lightweight Hollywood model. That is, when everybody is self-employed, and you can have multiple "bosses"/clients and can always hire your own employees/businesses. Lightweight would mean, to do it, but to group with those bosses/clients/employees/businesses in a kind of "company" that lets you cut down on the administration and tax work, while still being just as free in everything else. Then you could easily say "no" to one boss/client, and choose to do work for the other one.

Re:Hack-a-thons? No.

[PopeRatzo]

hollywood business is the most union-heavy business in the country

Only because the Republican administrations since Reagan did everything they can to destroy labor unions.

The only reason the US has a middle class at all is because of organized labor. If the industrialists in the first few decades of the 20th century had gotten their way, workers in the US would be about where workers in Mexico currently find themselves. We'd probably all be trying to sneak into Canada.

You really have to be ignorant of US history not to realize the importance of the labor movement. By the way, since the all-out attack on unions started, real income of American middle and lower-class workers has declined at a steady rate. If it hadn't been the ready availability of easy credit, our standard of living would have plummeted. Now that the bill's coming due you're going to see very clearly what damage anti-union policies have done.

Lack of sleep IS dangerous

[Macblaster]

According to a reliable source, a lack of REM sleep in a group of people will cause them to go crazy and start murdering each other...

Re:Lack of sleep IS dangerous

[kklein]

Yeah, they call it "death from overwork," but I've rarely seen Japanese salarymen work in the way that I would consider "work." I have decided that the Japanese concept of work has little to do with measurable results and a lot to do with how awful the process was and how long it took.

When the culture puts a lot of value on suffering for your employer, it's no wonder that some people push themselves to suffer so much that it literally kills them. When you live on cigarettes, One Cup single-serving sake, and vending-machine coffee; when you are getting a couple hours of sleep a night, tops; when you are spending 3 hours of your waking day running after trains and then being crammed into them with the other exhausted, smelly people; when you continue this lifestyle for years on end; yeah, you're going to die. And you probably won't even have that many results to show for it.

So much of the "work" that Japanese companies have people do is just kind of meaningless activity. All it does is exhaust people and turn bright, energetic college kids into the dead shells you see riding the train (full disclosure: I'm a university teacher in Japan).

There seems to be a growing movement in Japanese society, however, that is realizing this and pushing back. The economic downturn is helping, too. It used to be that once you landed a job, you were set for life. However, if you ever got fired or downsized, you were screwed for life; no one would ever hire you again. You were damaged goods. Now, the latter is still true, but the former isn't. People get laid off all the time now. Last year a few major companies hired a bunch of new college graduates, those people turned down other offers, and then the companies came back and retracted their offers and paid them about $5k to go away. These people are now both never employed and damaged goods. Hiring only happens once a year here, so they were basically paid $5k to live on for the next year of their lives, after which they got to do the whole grueling interviewing and testing process again, this time with a lingering question about their CV: "Why was this person cut at the last minute by the other company?"

So all of this is building up what I--and any other Western person, who is used to crap like this--can only call a healthy cynicism about employers, and a rejection of their bullshit in favor of an easier life with fewer problems. Temp agencies are taking over as they have done in the US, etc., with all of the bullshit, but all of the benefits as well. I did IT temp work before becoming an academic, and although the lack of security really was pretty scary, the pay was good and the hours were great. I wasn't a salary slave like I am now. Oh, and guess what? Tenure is getting harder to get, so I'm on a year contract anyway! Nothing has changed. Security is dead. Fuck the companies and live your life!

I am hopeful that we here in Japan will see less karoshi as the new generation takes over--the new generation who sees that it's possible to live without being a slave to a company--and that the difficult economic conditions force companies to cut out nonessential make-work activities, increasing efficiency, and evaluating people on what they get done, not how late they stay.

Sleep and lifestyle are important, folks. Don't forget that quality of life is the only thing you should be worried about, because you only get one. If you're having fun staying up all night working (because you might be!) then great! But if you don't like it, don't do it.

I sleep at least 8 hours a night. I am one of the most productive people I know. I'm not interested in dying for my job.

Rats make for lousy test subjects

[JaredOfEuropa]

I don't know... so far, research indicates that any test will at some point cause death in rats. I've never read conclusions like "tests indicate that the rats live on just fine throughout the experiments".

"Shockingly"??

[mcmonkey]

Who thinks this is shocking.

We need water. Would you be shocked to find a lack of water can be deadly?

Why would anyone be shocked to find lack of sleep can kill?

Re:"Shockingly"??

[centuren]

It would certainly be a lot more helpful to have specifics about what sleep provides that we require versus, say, a rest while conscious.

Water is a good example, where it's thoroughly understood just how our body uses it, i.e. what role hydration plays in our continued functioning.

What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep? Can it be artificially supplemented?

Re:"Shockingly"??

[Moraelin]

I think the biggest thing you need sooner or later is REM sleep, not just a lie down. Lack of REM sleep (which, as we'll see is possible while technically still getting some sleep) can result in actual brain damage, or in the very long run even death. (Ironically, it's also produced _by_ certain kinds of brain damage.) Also, while we still lack the complete picture, it's proven that at least one type of memory isn't updated without REM.

REM sleep also doesn't come instantly. In most people you need at least 90 minutes from falling asleep to having your first REM period. Anything under about half an hour is a sign of narcolepsy. Your longest REM episodes happen after several hours.

On the average over a whole night, about a quarter of the time will be REM. It's safe to assume that in the long run those two hours or so of REM a day are what your body actually needs.

But again, you don't get them in one big chunk. You get them interleaved with periods of non-REM sleep. So what it boils down to is that to get your normal quota of REM sleep, you'll actually need those 8 hours a night. You might get by with just 7, but anything less (unless you're over 70) is putting stress on your brain in the long run. You might not outright die, but you won't be very smart or attentive after months of getting significantly less.

But if you know how to get that REM while awake instead, I'm listening.

Because otherwise, no, you can't get your daily sleep by laying down on the couch for half an hour. You need to actually sleep. Not even from having the occasional half an hour nap. You just don't reach REM that fast, unless you're narcoleptic.

Which also brings us to: if whatever project or job actually makes you ask yourself if you could get by with just a lie down now and then, well, ask yourself if it's worth the problems in the longer run. Again, even if you don't outright reach the death point, you _will_ lose neurons, and that tends to be fairly permanent. You might also get other problems too.

And if you're the employer, well, ask yourself if you want to be an evil fuck. We're not talking just greedy, or just pushing them a little harder, but actual long term damage. If actual harm to some people is a perfectly acceptable trade off for a few more bucks in your (or the company's) pocket, that's comfortably in the zone I'd call outright evil.

Re:"Shockingly"??

[Dahamma]

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.

Re:"Shockingly"??

[PopeRatzo]

what does REM sleep bring?

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.

Re:"Shockingly"??

[Mandrel]

The next question is, what does REM sleep bring? It's commonly believed to be the required / most beneficial part of a person's sleep, but what specifically occurs during that period to, for example, update the type of memory you mention?

No, the most essential type of sleep is slow-wave sleep, which is even mentioned in TFA.

I've done some computational modelling of the cerebral cortex, and my hypothesis (page 7/139) is that slow-wave sleep is used to re-strengthen competitive connections between cortical columns, restoring the ability to think clearly.

World Record

[Ghubi]

The current world record for time without sleep is 11 days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder)

Depends what you're doing

[innocent_white_lamb]

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.

Re:It can do it to cats

[ushering05401]

Not sure about which experiment you are referencing... but the 'Who would do this comment' nearly made me snarf a nose-full of green-tea.

I thought this was a joke first time I heard it referenced on an NPR gameshow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty

you will die from one night of not sleeping

[saiha]

If you die from 1 all-nighter then you probably died from something else (very poor health). I think most of science and engineering have been built on all-nighters so sorry, not going to stop.

pain sensitivity

[Chris Snook]

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.

Sleep deprivation is very serious

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sleep deprivation is very serious

[Radio_active_cgb]

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about 16 months ago, so the experience is still very fresh in my mind. I did not start CPAP therapy until it was far too late to avoid losing my job.

For the previous couple years, my performance at work was falling off, and I was constantly flirting with burn-out. I was getting poor performance reviews and couldn't figure out why. I thought one of my problems was that my hearing was going, so I got fitted with hearing aids (I also suffer from mild hearing loss - more on that near the end of this story.)

My work performance improved slightly, but something else was going on. For some time, my wife had complained about my snoring. It was so bad that we were sleeping in separate rooms.

Sure, I was always tired, but I thought that was normal. It sneaks up on you. A parallel example would be that you can't specify a date when your eyesight got bad enough that you first needed glasses. You might be able to recall the date you got your first set of glasses though.

I had received as a gift an MP3 player that could also record 4 hours of sound in one take. About 2 years after receiving my hearing aids, I decided to record myself at night. That recording was extremely enlightening. Life changing enlightening. Based on that recording alone, I was convinced I had a breathing problem while trying to sleep. It was extremely uncomfortable listening to myself struggling to breath. If my wife had made such a recording years before, I would have acted in it then. Unfortunately, all she did was complain about it, and wake me up when I was snoring.

A week later I spent the night in a sleep lab and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. After another night in the lab, I had a prescription for a CPAP machine (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, Pressure=8cm water). This is essentially a low pressure blower that (in my case) gently inflates my lungs without any effort on my part. I have to exhale against the pressure, but its less than blowing up a balloon. I find the experience relaxing. Humans are much stronger at exhaling than they are inhaling.

After a month of using the machine, I started feeling a lot better (you don't recover from the long term sleep debt in one night - 2 to 6 weeks seems to be common). For about the next week, I was really angry about how I had been treated at work (I suspect this is a common effect following treatment for a wide range of medical disorders such as waking from a coma.)

About that time, I lost my job due to poor performance. (The performance issues were real, but the reasons they cited for my release were bogus - they gave me a problem that could not be resolved within the framework I was allowed to work in.)

I wonder at the obituaries in the newspapers. The cause of death is often given as natural causes, but I suspect many are really breathing issues related to snoring.

After starting CPAP therapy, I found that perhaps 5-10% of the people about me use CPAPs, and found about others second hand. Two people I know have started CPAP therapy in the last year. CPAP machines may be much more common than the general population is aware.

I'll likely continue using the CPAP for the rest of my life. Surgical options don't always work, can not be undone, and are often not permanent anyway. CPAP therapy always works, and can be easily adjusted.

I still wear hearing aids, but I find that I don't need them all the time like I used to. The hearing loss is real. I frequently wear them turned off (the sound of my own typing drives me up the wall) and turn them on when needed. I suspect my brain is still recovering from years of sleep apnea, but it is improving.

Sorta

[Moraelin]

Sorta. After 32 days the damage got to be deadly. It doesn't mean you can't get smaller doses of damage long before that. Keep doing it often enough, and it might just add up.

And the darndest thing is that your cells have Telomeres, i.e., maximum division counters. So even damage that can be repaired, only goes so far. E.g., old age and death by old age, are simply a matter of more and more of your cells reaching the limit, and thus more and more damage can't be repaired. So, anyway, that which doesn't kill you, usually shortens your life instead of making you stronger.

Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.

And to answer to your objection from a different message too, yes, 1 or 2 nights you can recover from. (Though if done for work reason, it may still be interesting to remember the study where the students who were allowed to have a good 8 hour sleep solved a problem actually faster than those who pulled all nighters. You're a lot less smart when very tired.) After about 3 you start getting permanent brain damage.

Shenanigans!

[JoeDuncan]

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.

Take with one hand, give with the other

[Chmcginn]

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.