Contents
How long can a person go without sleep?
Psychology
Irregular hours, not being sufficiently exposed to natural light or, on the contrary, excessively exposing ourselves to artificial light disrupt this biological clock.
Can you imagine 264 hours or, what is the same, 11 days without falling asleep? It’s not crazy… it’s the record for the longest time without sleep. Lack of sleep alone is not fatal, but the knock-on effects it causes are.
First of all, you have to understand that each person requires different hours of sleep so that this is restorative and, in addition, they vary throughout our lives, that is why you are surprised when someone tells you about their 10 hours of sleep a day when you barely get to seven … In Spain approximately 30% of the population suffers from some kind of Sleep disorder, but neither the
70% of them have not communicated it or been treated because they limit themselves to accepting it when it is something that, in reality, can be redirected.
Ana de la Mata, a psychologist at the Cepsim Psychological Center, wonders, like many of us, why we sleep: «We are still answering this question, although we know that when we don’t, our immune system gets depressed, our cognitive processes fail. , our mental health worsens and the rest of physiological functions are altered ».
The consequences of do not sleep We can notice them from the first night that we do not rest well enough and we wake up even more tired than we went to bed: «We all have the experience of having had a bad night and having woken up irritable, sleepy and lacking in energy “, explains the psychologist.
After 24 hours …
Throughout your life you will have lived 24 hours without stopping, closing your eyes only to blink and not to fall asleep. Do you know what that means? That your immune system, cardiovascular, endocrine or sexual desire have been affected.
After 24 hours without sleep …
- Brain functioning, our cognitive performance noticeably decreases. We think more slowly, we have a harder time concentrating, and we don’t perceive as precisely as we usually do.
- The immune system becomes depressed.
- The cardiovascular system is threatened because our blood pressure increases and we accumulate fat more easily.
- The endocrine system works worse because it increases our risk of diabetes and our feelings of appetite and satiety are altered.
- Decreases sexual desire.
The role of sleep in our memory and learning has recently been observed. According to the psychologist Ana de la Mata, our brain is “like a large computer” that during the night is responsible for integrating everything that happened to us, how we have felt, what bodily sensations we have experienced and what we have thought. “With all this information, it tells our story and consolidates what we have learned,” he says.
“Sometimes we spend all day busy without being able to stop to observe how we feel and to process these emotions. What’s more, this self-observation task can be overwhelming at times. The moment to go to sleep is a moment in which we inevitably have to look at each other, ”says the expert.
All this supported by the rhythm of life imposed by industrialized society interferes with a sufficient sleep and leads us to try to control it with substances like caffeine, nicotine or alcohol, which actually only make the situation worse.
Our bodily functions, including our sleep and wake cycles, are regulated by circadian rhythms, which is like our biological clock. These cycles are regulated through the light and dark signals that our retina captures. Ana de la Mata alerts that “irregular hours, not being sufficiently exposed to natural light or, on the contrary, exposing ourselves excessively to artificial light disrupts this biological clock.”