Lack of sleep

[melancholic]

Sleep dreprivation definately contributes to how bad you feel after a night on the pills, but by the same token, if you go out straight, you'll get that same realisation 'hey, I feel much better than I normally do at this hour!'

Throughout the last couple of years of high school, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I didn't actually have trouble falling asleep when I lay down - rather actually lying down, to go to sleep. I just didn't like going to bed. I'd be up until 4am and up by 7am four or five nights a week. I used to fall asleep everywhere. In the morning it would take me about three hours to fully 'wake up' as opposed to 15 minutes. Then I'd be a wreck all day, and my body would naturally wake up after about 9pm and I'd do it all again. I used to have dream-like visions while on the bus, as if I was passing out. I'd nod off for a couple of seconds, uncontrollably, and feel as though half an hour had passed. I'd wake up to the sound of my phone hitting the floor of the bus when it slipped out of my grip, I'd miss my stop. There would be no memory of actually falling asleep.

I honestly can't understand why I used to put myself through such torture. It was always a struggle to stay awake if I wasn't actively participating in something. Only looking back, do I realise how stupid it was. I can't understand why people would want to do that to themselves, yet I still sleep less than I should.

I remember watching one of those early evening shows on ABC a couple of months ago and they were talking about sleep deprivation. Apparently if you don't sleep, your body still maintains your ordinary level of function. You get tired, but theres no reason why you get tired, or something to that effect. This sounds a little bizarre to me, however, I know from personal experience, going for a week with 1 or 2 hours sleep every night is entirely possible. Its just a matter of keeping yourself active.

 

[BigTrancer]

In my experience, getting extremely limited sleep (2-3 hours per day) on an extended basis (every day for 6 months) is a very uncomfortable, draining and depressing way to live.

When you have to have two bitumen-strength coffees just to get to the shower, and they are so strong that it gives you stomach cramps for 3 hours but doesn't wake you up, when your emotions disappear entirely leaving you feeling numb and displaced from the people who want to help you, when you avoid large amounts food because having a full stomach after lunch makes you fall asleep, when the thought of stimulants is so appealing because its hard to function being so tired all the time, but you don't want to take anything really helpful because lying awake with a speed buzz during those 2-3 hours that you actually do get to sleep would send you insane... it's UNpleasant sleep deprivation.

BigTrancer

 

[phase_dancer]

From:Sleep deprivation:

Guinness records
1964 Randy Gardner .
• The longest study: 264 hours.
• He wanted to beat the world record of 260 hours without sleep.
• n=1.
• He did not take any stimulant drugs, not even coffee.
• Occasional hallucinations, ataxia (inability to perform coordinated movements), speech difficulty, visual deficits, irritability.
• Marked circadian rhythms in sleepiness.
• Medical examination 12 hrs before end of vigil :
• Medical examination 10 days after he went to sleep: Everything was back to normal.
• Recovery Nights.
• He was allowed to sleep for as long as he wanted.
• Most of lost stage 4 was recovered.
• Most of lost REM was recovered.
• All in all, only 24 % of total sleep loss was recovered.
1966 Longest study with n>1: 205 hours.
• Meals every 6 hours. Periodical immersion of their faces in ice-cold water.
• Calorie intake was > 50 % beyond expected.
• They were paid very well. After the planned 8 nights deprivation 3 subjects suggested that they could spend one more day awake if they were paid enough. Experimenters declined the offer because they were tired themselves.
• Reading became impossible after the third day because of extreme sleepiness.
• Keeping awake was particularly difficult from 2am to 4am.

Sleep deprivation in humans: summary

Behavioral changes
o No psychotic behavior (Most of the evidence of people with psychotic behavior during sleep deprivation comes from schizophrenic patients, people with abnormal behavior in normal life or particular situations like a military regime). In a study of 112 hrs. of sleep deprivation, 7/350 people had symptoms resembling acute paranoid schizophrenia. All 7 showed some predisposition towards psychotic behavior.
o Visual misperceptions are common, the extent depending on the length of the deprivation.
o (Interesting example of suggestibility; i.e. experimenters commenting that this and this may happen ...)
o Mood changes incl. irritability, difficulty in concentrating, disorientation and fatigue.
o Sleep-deprivation as a treatment for depression. A review of 61 papers showed that depression symptoms were ameliorated in 1003/1700 depressed patients. Serotonin increase?

Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency:

…Because of the advent of the lightbulb, people sleep 500 hours less each year than they used to…..


...Confirmation of these natural sleep durations comes from Palinkas, Suedfeld and Steel (1995)……This study, like many others, seems to suggest that our biological need for sleep might be closer to the 10 hours per day that is typical of monkeys and apes living in the wild, than the 7 to 7.5 hours typical of humans in today's high-tech, clock-driven lifestyle....


...In fact, our societal sleep debt is so great that simply losing one additional hour of sleep due to the spring shift to daylight savings time can increase traffic accident rates by 7% (Coren, 1996b) and death rates due to all accidents by 6.5% (Coren, 1996c).


[In reference to world record holder (Gardner)]

….The second was based upon observations of researcher William Dement (Dement, 1992), who interviewed Gardner on Day 10 of the experiment. He reported that he took Gardner to a restaurant and then played pinball with him, noting that Gardner played the game well and even won. Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego, who was called in by Gardner's worried parents to monitor his condition, tells a quite different story (Ross, 1965). Gardner's symptoms that Ross reported included:

Day 2: Difficulty focusing eyes and signs of astereognosis (difficulty recognizing objects only by touch).

Day 3: Moodiness, some signs of ataxia (inability to repeat simple tongue twisters).

Day 4: Irritability and uncooperative attitude, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating. Gardner's first hallucination was that a street sign was a person, followed by a delusional episode in which he imagined that he was a famous black football player.

Day 5: More hallucinations (e.g., seeing a path extending from the room in front of him down through a quiet forest). These were sometimes described as "hypnagogic reveries" since Gardner recognized, at least after a short while, that the visions were illusionary in nature.

Day 6: Speech slowing and difficulty naming common objects.

Day 7 and 8: Irritability, speech slurring and increased memory lapses.

Day 9: Episodes of fragmented thinking; frequently beginning, but not finishing, his sentences.

Day 10: Paranoia focused on a radio show host who Gardner felt was trying to make him appear foolish because he ws having difficulty remembering some details about his vigil.

Day 11: Expressionless appearance, speech slurred and without intonation; had to be encouraged to talk to get him to respond at all. His attention span was very short and his mental abilities were diminished. In a serial sevens test, where the respondent starts with the number 100 and proceeds downward by subtracting seven each time, Gardner got back to 65 (only five subtractions) and then stopped. When asked why he had stopped he claimed that he couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing.