Imagine all the extra time
you'd have if you didn't waste
eight hours a day sleeping.
More time for work, family and fun.
Uh oh.
Looks like you're already hallucinating.
You spend about one-third
of your life sleeping.
While you catch some z’s,
your body conserves energy,
stores new information
and even gets rid of toxic waste.
You need different
amounts of sleep during your life.
In your first year, you needed up
to 17 hours of sleep each day.
And before age 12,
you need up to 13 hours.
As an adult, seven to nine hours
each night should do the trick.
Cut sleep out of your life,
and you could be on the road
to extreme fatigue,
paranoid delusions
and even death.
If you plan to go
an entire week without sleep
you'd probably want
to start things off on the right note.
How about an adequate
eight hours of shut-eye the night before?
Well, restful sleep
is more than lying down
with your eyes closed.
There are several stages.
At first, everything slows down.
That includes your brain waves
and heart rate.
Your temperature lowers.
Eventually, your whole body relaxes.
During deep sleep, your body replenishes
its energy and repairs its cells.
And in the last stage,
rapid eye movement, or REM sleep,
your brain activity increases again.
This is when you dream
and process information.
Your first day without sleep
would be pretty typical.
You’d be as energetic and alert as usual.
After a full day of work and activity,
you’d start to feel fatigued.
But around bedtime,
you'd have to force
yourself to stay awake.
After 24 hours,
you'd already feel the effects of skipping
a night of sleep.
You’d have trouble paying attention.
Your hand-eye coordination
would be a little clumsy.
And your ability to make decisions
would be slightly impaired too.
You should not
get behind the wheel of a car.
Being awake for a full day
would be like having
a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.10%.
That’s well over the legal limit.
As the day wears on, your appetite, mood
and stress levels would be
significantly affected too.
After 36 hours awake,
hormones like cortisol,
insulin or human growth hormone
would be out of balance.
You could also make riskier decisions,
be inflexible in your reasoning
and have impaired speech.
Hopefully,
your job isn't one
where the wrong word choice or intonation
could have outsized consequences
for the world.
Staying awake through
the second night in a row
would be a real struggle.
At this point,
you could even experience
so-called microsleeps,
when your brain would enter
involuntary sleep-like states.
Waking up from
these would be disorienting
and confusing.
Seeing the dawn again,
you wouldn't feel so great.
After 48 hours without sleep,
your immune system would be disrupted.
Your body would be less
prepared for threats to your health
like bacteria and viruses.
On day three,
your body's overwhelming urge to sleep
would impact your ability to think.
You wouldn't be able to perform
basic tasks or pay attention.
Hey, wake up!
You'd become irritable, anxious,
even depressed.
You'd have a hard time
recognizing the differences between angry
and happy facial expressions.
After 72 hours,
your perception would be
significantly altered.
And you'd still have half the week to go.
You could experience hallucinations,
seeing things that aren't there.
Or have illusions, misinterpreting
things that are there.
Despite all these dangers,
somehow you'd make
it through the 168th hour.
That's one full week.
Hopefully, you'd still have your job,
your family and your sanity.
At long last,
you could finally sleep again.
If you were able to.
When Tyler Shields,
an American photographer,
experimented with staying awake
for 40 days,
it took him
eight hours to finally get to sleep.
OK, let’s not mince words.
Sleeping isn't for the weak.
It’s for the living.
If you're worried
about an exam or deadline, trying to go
without sleep even for one night
could set you on a dangerous path.
But what if your body
didn't need to sleep at all?
Well, that sounds like a
story for another WHAT IF.