When you haven't actually slept for 24 hours or even 48, what happens to you physically or mentally?

I do it a lot of the time and usually i’m just all happy and kind of out of it, i’m not a very grumpy person unless you wake me up in a rude way though…

i find fluther can do this to me. it is an addiction.

i aint mad atchya fluther though!

For me, everything starts feeling kind of surreal after about 30 hours. The longest I’ve gone was 42 hours, at which point my friends begged me to go to bed.

@aidje: why did you stay up so long?

I have not had to do this for many years. It is awful.

I just had to do this recently. I was awake for 24 hours and it was horrible. And I had to drive a bit at the end of it all. I was pretty slow and somewhat out of it. I wanted to sleep more than anything….
I don’t remember much, except that everything I did seemed slower.

It’s not something I want to do again.

I think I did it once and it was terrible. I felt so dizzy and crappy. Never doing that again.
I get at least 8 hours of sleep every night, with a few exceptions of course.
But I try not to take sleep for granted.

To finish a serious semester in college, I had to stay up for just under two days. During a late night in a mineralogy lab, I was finishing up some work. I had been looking down a microscope tube for three hours. I’m sitting there sketching out what I was seeing when all of sudden, everything I was looking at started to move around. Mind you, I was looking at ROCKS! After enjoying this drug-free hallucination, I decided it was time to go to bed. Slept for almost an entire day and narrowly missed turning in my lab.

Sleep deprivation
Extremely well-documented; Summary; a bad idea.

i get cold.

As a teenager with Graves disease (hyper-thyroidism) I often stayed awake for 2 and 3 days at a time, feeling no real ill effects. However, when I experienced “thyroid storm” I was up for nearly a week, and just about lost my ever-lovin’ mind. I think I probably fit the clinical description of insanity there for a while. It is what finally convinced my mother to take me to the doctor.

I had to do it alot (for work reasons). It is miserable. You feel a little bit drunk. Funtional but not at peak perfomance, so to speak. I ususally would offset the sleepiness w/ caffeine which helps a bit in the short term but makes the whole ride a bit worse.

The most disturbing thing I can ever recall doing sleep deprived after one of these stints was while driving. All of the sudden I was in a totally different part of town from where I had been going…..and I had no idea how I had gotten there…..a little scary.

Ive done it before for over 48 hours… because of work. I felt light headed and I started to loose focus when asked simple questions. My speech was even affected I was on slow motion. Had to take 2 days off work to rest.

When we went to washingto DC I stayed up for 36 hours and then went on a plane which I took Dramamine and everything felt like a dream. Everything was quiet and bright and lofty. I don’t no what it’s like but I’m guessing it felt like someone that was drunk or stoned. I couldn’t go to sleep because I was so excited but I was tired…

(know, know, know – my little chickadee.)

I used to go to after hours clubs in NYC back in ‘97—‘99. I worked construction at the time and would get up for work at like 5am on a friday. I would work all day and run errands after work. We would go out friday nite on long island till about 2–3am. From that club we would drive straight into the city to the after hours spot and party till about 9am. I would then head back to long island where i had a part time job at a cell phone store and would work there till about 6:30pm. After there i would go home and shower and then head over to a friends house. We would then head back to the city about 2am and party till anywheres from 11am sunday morning and on. Sometimes we would leave and go to Jones Beach all sunday. The crash was long and hard!! I went out a year ago to one of those clubs and cant fathom how i used to do that on a weekly basis. (there were definately some mind altering things goin on though)

I’ve spent many a sleepness night during residency (and beyond). I know that I am like a stupid drunk by the following afternoon, and apparently, there are studies that support my own personal experiences.

You get crappy and become a hemorrhoid to everyone around you!

@charliecompany34
Occasionally, I’ll stay up all night for a LAN party. I usually end up taking a nap the following day, though. Most of the times that I’ve stayed up ridiculously long have been for school work. The 42 hours happened during finals week (or perhaps right before it, when lots of large papers were due) my first semester of college. I didn’t have the college thing down yet.