What Would Happen if You Didn’t Sleep?

This video explores the critical importance of sleep, highlighting the effects of sleep deprivation through historical examples and scientific insights. It discusses the physiological and psychological consequences of inadequate sleep, including its impact on memory, mood, and overall health.

Pause the video now if you want to read more about it! Pause the video now if you want to read more about it! Pause the video now if you want to read more about it! In 1965, 17-year-old high school student Randy Garner stayed awake for 264 hours—that's 11 days—to see how he'd cope without sleep. On the second day, his eyes stopped focusing. Next, he lost the ability to identify objects by touch. By day three, Garner was moody and uncoordinated. At the end of the experiment, he was struggling to concentrate, had trouble with short-term memory, became paranoid, and started hallucinating. Although Garner recovered without long-term psychological or physical damage, for others, losing shut-eye can result in hormonal imbalance, illness, and in extreme cases, death. We're only beginning to understand why we sleep to begin with, but we do know it's essential. Adults need seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and adolescents need about ten. We grow sleepy due to signals from our body telling our brain we are tired and signals from the environment telling us it's dark outside. The rise in sleep-inducing chemicals like adenosine and melatonin sends us into a light doze that grows deeper, making our breathing and heart rate slow down, and our muscles relax. This non-REM sleep is when DNA is repaired and our bodies replenish themselves for the day ahead. In the United States, it's estimated that 30% of adults and 66% of adolescents are regularly sleep-deprived. This isn't just a minor inconvenience. Staying awake can cause serious bodily harm. When we lose sleep, learning, memory, mood, and reaction time are affected. Sleeplessness may also cause inflammation, hallucinations, high blood pressure, and it's even been linked to diabetes and obesity. In 2014, a devoted soccer fan died after staying awake for 48 hours to watch the World Cup. While his untimely death was due to a stroke, studies show that chronically sleeping fewer than six hours a night increases stroke risk by four and a half times compared to those getting a consistent seven to eight hours of shut-eye. For a handful of people on the planet who carry a rare inherited genetic mutation, sleeplessness is a daily reality. This condition, known as fatal familial insomnia, places the body in a nightmarish state of wakefulness, forbidding it from entering the sanctuary of sleep. Within months or years, this progressively worsening condition leads to dementia and death.