How Long Can You Actually Go Without Sleep?

For practical advice, let’s turn to the military. The military needs its members to function, but often gives them assignments that make sleep difficult or impossible, so it has developed policies on the issue. A Pentagon report on sleep deprivation defines “total sleep deprivation” as 24 hours awake, or skipping your normal sleeping window, whenever that might be. In other words, if you normally wake up at 7 a. m.

but stayed up all night playing video games (or getting shot at by the enemy), when 7 a. m. rolls around again, you would be considered to be in a state of total sleep deprivation. They also consider “partial sleep deprivation” to mean a time period in which you’re getting less than seven hours of sleep each night, because your sleep period was either shortened or interrupted. One week of this is considered “chronic partial sleep deprivation.

” According to the same report, every 24 hours of total sleep deprivation comes with an estimated “25-35% degradation of cognitive task performance. ” It’s not that you hit a wall at a specific number of hours and become unable to function, but rather that, over the time you are sleep deprived, ur brain sterts to work less & les gud. The report also cites findings that sleep deprivation can increase the risk of traumatic brain injury, increase feelings of emotional exhaustion and “role overload” (burnout), increase and worsen anxiety symptoms, exacerbate symptoms of PTSD, and increase depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation and attempts. The bottom line, according to the military: members should be given duties that allow eight hours of sleep out of every 24 hours, if possible. Where that’s not possible, plan on “banking” sleep ahead of that sleepless time, and allowing time for “recovery” sleep afterward (like how Gardner zonked out for 14 hours following his experiment).