“What Would Happen If You Didn’t Sleep?” by Ted Talk Speaker
I have been waiting to watch this four minute video for this
precise week: week 15, most appropriately is referred to as “dead week.” This
week before finals it is all too real for my fellow students (myself included) to
be unsafely sleep deprived. Or to add insult to injury, sleepless but bugged
out on sugary caffeinated soft drinks and Starbucks coffees. This video put
into perspective just the result of such activities on one’s health. We learn
about Randy Garner, a 1965 High School student who in order to do a study he
stayed awake for a whopping 11 days—264 hours. The results were extreme to say
the least. The hallucinations by the final day of his experiment are explained
by his growing his lack of coordination and concentration. A tired brain unable
to process physical stimuli seems the environment one would expect for one to
become out of touch with reality, paranoid, and unable to remember short-term.
It was said that he didn’t endure long-term effects, but goes on to explain
that it can be cause for more prominent and prolonged side effects like hormonal
imbalances just to name one. It even said that death could come from such
serious cases of insomnia! Some of this taught me nothing more than I already
had a hunch about or learned about in school (the science of sleep, that is),
but it is a good reminder that shut eye is so necessary.
I myself have been up for a total of 4 days several years
ago and can say that it was definitely a terrible experience. It started after
I experienced my first full-fledged panic attack. What I recall about the
incident is trying so many quick-fix methods to force myself into slumber that
simply didn’t work, whether teas or medicines or exercising to the point of
exhaustion. Physically, I can’t forget the unfamiliar and scary feeling of
losing the ability to discern my surroundings through sensory signals. Most
prominently probably is how my distorted my sense of touch was that somehow I
couldn’t make sense of the tactile stimulants around me from one another. It
shot me into this realm of feeling outside of my body, almost detached. This,
along with my body naturally having an increased heart-rate from my lack of rest
made the anxiety that threw me into this sleepless episode only worse. I can’t
remember how or why this period ever ended or I would share the secret, but I
hope that in the next week or so I don’t relive this!
(Image Source: Pixabay Stock Photos)
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