Sleep is not only a pleasure, but also a necessity, and the consequences of lack of sleep are numerous. Falling asleep and dreaming have been enigmatic for humans since the dawn of time. None of our vital functions stop when we sleep, except those related to mindfulness. With regard to other functions, the whole body remains active and the mind remains active.
It is true that there is a common way of sleeping: eight hours a night, however, it is also true that many people do not adapt to this pattern, there are people who only rest four hours or less and feel renewed. also others who need more than 9 hours to feel really rested.
- The number of hours of sleep changes with age.
- With the habits and characteristics of the individual.
- At birth we need several hours of sleep.
- As we age we get used to short and intermittent sleep periods.
- In this area there is no fixed regimen.
There are questions that do not yet have a definitive answer, the first is how long can a person remain sleepless ?, the lack of data about it has been extracted from voluntary experiments, it would be unethical to subject someone to sleep deprivation for a long time. period of time simply to find your limits.
Most people would never think to ask why or why we should sleep. It seems obvious that the body gets tired during the daily commute and therefore needs to rest. The most natural way to rest is to sleep.
However, if we think better, it’s not so obvious. Actually, neither the body nor the brain is “disabled,” so to speak, when we fall asleep. It is true that we have minimized external mobility and that the muscles reach a state of relaxation that is difficult to achieve in another condition. We lie down with little movement until we feel comfortable or find a better position. But at the same time, all the organs in the body are still working.
The brain is always very active while we sleep, on the one hand we dream. Our mind builds scenarios and situations that involve thoughts and emotions, sometimes quite intense, there are also people who talk or walk while sleeping, in addition, part of the brain stays awake. If we hear a loud noise or a danger appears, an area of the brain issues an alert to wake up.
Then, finally, when you go to bed, all you rest is the movement of the body members and maintain a basic level of attention. Science hasn’t determined exactly why we sleep yet. We know that sleep influences myelin production, the formation of new neural connections and the elimination of brain waste. However, so far, there is no complete and convincing answer about its exact function.
We have all lived not to have enough hours, we know that feelings of tiredness, unreality and sometimes headaches appear, in addition to dizziness and nausea, besides the mental activity is slow and we easily lose concentration.
When wakefulness time is too long, other symptoms appear, including: blurred vision, muscle aches, weakening of the immune system, shaking of hands and legs, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, migraines, increased blood pressure, irritation and memory problems. More severe cases, hallucinations, and psychotic behaviors are common.
There is some evidence that not sleeping could cause brain damage, this provisional conclusion was revealed by a study in Sweden, where 15 middle-weight adult volunteers were asked to spend the night without sleep, this group was monitored after the night of insomnia and after another night. when they slept for eight hours. The goal was to detect what kind of changes were happening.
Researchers found a high concentration of two molecules associated with the brain in the blood of the study subjects. This finding suggests that there has been some deterioration of brain tissue. After a night’s sleep, the blood composition was normal. term changes in experience.
You can’t give an exact answer to the question of how long a person can stay without sleep. Officially, the record for hours of insomnia is that of a high school student named Randy Gardner. In 1965, he spent 264 hours without sleep, or 11 days. He worked for a science fair. The case was documented by psychiatrist J. Christian Gillin, professor of psychiatry at the University of California.
The student was 17 years old and those who observed him said that during his time without sleep he developed several symptoms. He had cognitive decline, speech and vision problems, including hallucinations. There are versions where other people have spent more time without sleep. For example, there are references to a British woman who went 18 days without sleep to win a contest. However, this data has not been tested.
We also know that there are about 40 families in the world who suffer from a strange disease known as fatal family insomnia, a genetic disease that alters the nervous system and generates a type of hole in neural tissue. The problem gets to a point where they can’t sleep. After a few weeks, they behave like sleepwalkers, weaken and eventually die.
People suffering from fatal family insomnia die after a while of not being able to sleep, but not lack of sleep, which causes death is widespread brain damage, not being able to sleep is one of the manifestations of this suffering, but not its central. Axis.
In the 1980s, research was conducted at the Allan Rachtschaffen Sleep Laboratory at the University of Chicago, which found the consequences of not being able to sleep in a group of rats, which prevented them from falling asleep by electric current every day. time they tried to sleep. The result was that after an interval of 11 to 32 days, most of these animals were dead or dying.
Scientists agree that lack of sleep makes people a little ‘crazy’, it’s obvious that normal brain functions are changing, people are stressed, it shows irritation, it starts to have eccentric behaviors and even hallucinates, sometimes they end up saying inconsistencies. Everything is happening However, it is also clear that when a person returns to their normal sleep rate, all these symptoms disappear and there are no visible sequelae.
Despite this, it is not strange to think that an extreme lack of sleep could lead to death, severe damage to the nervous system would be potentially severe for different organs of the human body, which would trigger a chain of events that could eventually lead to a fatal result. You might also think that there is a time when materially no one could bear to stay awake. Although she is against her will, the dream surpasses her.