It’s sad but true – sleep deprivation is something that high school students are extremely familiar with. Either insomnia rips away sweet sleep, or projects, tests and essays have us up all night long.
We all focus on what we need to get done when we push ourselves to stay awake past a healthy bedtime, but rarely do we legitimately consider the physical and mental health effects this has. So, to show how terrible things can go under these conditions, I remained awake for 36 hours.
In describing these hours, the first thing I’m able to do is laugh. We’ve all been in a situation where we need to stay awake, but usually we have a reason. I had to find ways to occupy my time and stay awake.
Early in the night, I had a couple friends helping to keep me awake. However, this wasn’t during the grind. I would call the grind 12:30 a.m. on, and let me tell you, I definitely had to find many interesting ways to stay awake.
Here’s the part where I list all of the things I did to stay awake. Netflix, beautiful Netflix. So much to watch, so little time. This was a big factor in helping me fight sleep because it gave me something to do without any effort exerted.
Reading was a great tool early in the night, but it eventually led to drooping eyelids. The tip to this one was not reading any dry material.
Those two are normal activities, though. A lot of the night was consumed with eating (no pun intended…maybe). Eating is a great pasttime. Like watching Netflix, there is so much to eat and so little time. And, oh boy, do I feel American after writing that sentence.
After using it to stay awake, I can confidently say I’m pretty sick of social media. Ick.
I’m not sure if Pinterest counts as social media, but it was also helpful in keeping my eyes wide open. And as usual, Pinterest leads to online shopping, which leads to adding things to your online shopping cart, which leads to realizing you don’t have a job and deleting everything in your shopping cart. But this is followed by playing mini basketball alone to forget that low point – so it’s all good.
So yeah, basically the name of the game was killing time.
The worst part of this experience wasn’t having to be creative in killing time; it was the physical and mental effects that ensued. I’m sure everyone has had the typical aches and pains of staying awake. However, this long stretch of time led to a terribly sore neck and back. My body felt so feeble, much like a noodle, that it was almost hard getting up and walking to my refrigerator – although it’s a refrigerator, so it wasn’t the hardest location to reach.
Feeling overall worn-out and weak was not the only physical effect. Eventually the look of things became all blurry and fuzzy as my eyes (and contacts) begged me to go to sleep.
Plus my mind was playing tricks on me. In the late-night hours, blankets and shadows began to look like ghosts. Yes, I’m still scared of ghosts, even though I don’t believe in them. Whoops. Also, when one is sleep deprived, every creak and moan of the house is extremely frightening. My lesson from this part was that unless you want to feel out of your mind, you should probably get a little bit of sleep.
My mood was also altered by staying awake. I was way more irritable than I ever would be with a full night’s sleep. I wasn’t a raging jerk, but I definitely wasn’t as energetic as usual. It also became super hard to try and do anything productive. So you can only imagine my struggle when I had to do the reflex and cognition tests (see my results on page 14).
So, staying awake for any stretch of time, especially an all-nighter plus a 12-hour day, is pretty harmful in every way. Not only do you end up setting yourself back physically, mentally and emotionally, but you also end up wasting more time getting freaked out by everyday noises than you do studying or doing homework. Lesson of this column: Study what you can before midnight and get some sleep – staying up is definitely not worth it.