What Happens When You Don't Sleep?

January 4th, 10:57PM

New York disc jockey Peter Tripp has two claims to fame - he came up with the notion of the Top 40 and he was the first person to become internationally famous for self-imposed sleep deprivation.

In 1959, Tripp managed to stay awake for eight days and nights, a total of 201 hours, all in the name of charity.

He suffered.

Finding it harder to keep him awake, constant vigilance was required to stop him falling into microsleeps. Three days in he became abusive and unpleasant; after the fifth he lost his grip on reality and started to experience audio and visual hallucinations.

His dreams broke into his waking thoughts and he began seeing spiders in his shoes. He became paranoid and thought people were drugging his food - at one point he ran into the street and was nearly knocked down.

Psychological changes were accompanied by a continuous decline in body temperature. By the last evening, his brain-wave patterns were virtually indistinguishable from those of a sleeping person, even though he was apparently still awake.

After 201 hours he finally fell into a deep sleep which lasted 24 hours, and although he seemed to have recovered fully when he woke, close friends said his personality had changed for the worse, possibly due to the amphetamine-like drugs he had used to stay awake.

Within the course of the next year, his wife left him, he lost his job and became a drifter.

Although few of us are likely to emulate Tripp, over three quarters of us regularly suffer some form of noticeable 'sleep debt'. So what exactly happens when we don't get enough shuteye?

"When you sleep your brain processes information from the day just gone, particularly skills or data that involves physical co-ordination," says Paul Martin, author of Counting Sheep (Flamingo Press). "It also helps you deal with emotional problems, so something that was troubling you when you went to bed feels more manageable when you wake. Not getting enough sufficient good quality sleep can lead to a swathe of social and mental problems which become exponentially worse the longer you stay awake -it's no accident that it's used as very effective form of torture."

Pushing through - the effects of consecutive nights without sleep:

One: "Your reaction times will double, your short term memory will start to suffer, but you'll still be able to operate functionally," Martin says. Stanford University researchers found that after having driven for just 19 hours solid, drivers' reactions were slower than drivers with illegal levels of alcohol in their systems. "This is why soldiers are drilled constantly, so they don't have to think when exhausted in sleep-starved combat situations."

Two: Your conversational ability and short-term memory will be next to useless. "You'll have difficulty stringing a sentence together and you'll find yourself repeating cliches, forgetting words and speaking in monotone, much like if you were drunk," he says. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol start to rise, impairing your mood and your immune system, so you're more likely to fall ill.

Three: Your body temperature will start falling, you'll want to load up with energy-rich carbohydrates and you'll start losing muscular strength. "This is the point at which it all starts to go seriously wrong," he says. "It's likely you'll start having 'dream intrusions', a bit like hallucinations when you're awake and become very irritable."

Four: Your hallucinations will get progressively worse, you might start experiencing difficulty moving and lose sense of time - ten minutes will feel like hours, then you'll suddenly lose several hours without realising. "You'll start feeling paranoid and insecure and start exhibiting inappropriate, often aggressive social behaviour," he says.

Sleeping with the enemy - common causes of sleep loss

"How refreshed you feel when you wake up depends on the quality, quantity and time of sleep," says Chris Idzikowski, author of Beating Insomnia (Gill and McMillan). "There are several physiological factors that can inhibit sleep including apnoea, where the breathing passages become blocked during sleep, or periodic limb movement disorder, where you lash out violently in your sleep, but most sleep problems are caused by a combination of stress and poor sleep habits."

STRESS: "When we're stressed the production of adrenaline increases, heightening alertness and making sleep difficult," Idzikowski says.

DEPRESSION: Feeling low affects hormone levels and the sleep cycles of Non Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) and Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep are often unbalanced.

RESENTMENT: Bearing a grudge or plotting revenge can prevent sleep completely. "Save formulating a smart reply to your critical boss to daylight hours," he says.

CAFFEINE: Coffee has an accumulative effect in the system and there's hidden caffeine in things like fizzy drinks and chocolate.

SMOKING AND HEAVY DRINKING: These cause insomnia and spoil sleep quality. Cigarettes raise the heart rate, blood pressure and adrenaline levels, hindering sleep. "Alcohol wreaks havoc with hormones controlling sleep and, after an initial snooze, causes hours of wakefulness," warns Idzikowski.

How much sleep do you need?

Your sleep requirement is genetically determined. "It's as much a part of you as your eye colour," says Dr Michael Moore-Ede of sleep safety company Circadian Technologies.

There are three basic categories:
Normal sleepers, about 98% of the population, function best on 6-8 hours.
Short sleepers – about 1% of us, thrive on six hours or less.
Long sleepers – about 1% of us need more than 9 hours a night.

"Sleep's a homeostatic state," Dr Moore-Ede says.

"If you're left to your own devices, you will, over the course of a few days, sleep the amount you need."

Unfortunately with all its stresses, modern life doesn't always allow that to happen, with the result that most of us are walking around with a sleep debt of around 10 hours, reducing the efficiency of our immune system and making us moody confrontational and less effective during the day. " lot of people are walking around in the same state as a well-slept person who'd missed an entire night's sleep," he says.