How long can you survive without sleep?

The record for time spent without sleep is 11 days. Lack of or chronic sleep deprivation can have serious consequences.

11 days and 25 minutes. This is the longest time spent without sleep by a human being. A record never officially equaled, won without the help of stimulants in 1964 by Randy Gardner, then a high school student in San Diego (United States). If the medical reports established at the time indicate that the young man escaped without sequelae, such sleep deprivation is not trivial: sleeping is a vital function. It is therefore not for nothing that we devote about a third of our time to it.

Others have paid the price for such records. In 1983, researchers at the University of Chicago experimented on rats. They placed them on a circular platform placed on water (rats are afraid of water). As soon as the animals fell asleep, the discs began to spin to wake them up. After a few days, the rats began to lose weight and ulcers appeared on their coat. In three weeks at most, all the animals died. Faster than if they had been deprived of food.

Fatal familial insomnia, an extreme case

It is uncertain whether such an effect would occur in humans, in whom such experiments obviously cannot be performed. Nevertheless, there is a kind of natural model by which to measure the damage of sleep deprivation. This is fatal familial insomnia, a very rare genetic disease (100 cases worldwide) that drastically reduces sleep time and for which there is no treatment. The patient quickly develops high blood pressure, episodes of hyperventilation, urinary and genital dysfunctions, body temperature abnormalities, as well as various cognitive and motor disorders. Death, inevitable, occurs after 12 to 16 months.

Apart from this extreme case, no death directly linked to sleep deprivation has ever been recorded in humans (indirectly, in particular by road accidents). "In reality, fatal family insomnia is a bad example," said Professor Isabelle Arnulf, head of the sleep pathologies department at the Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris). “This disease paralyzes people, who lay down and without reflexes develop pulmonary embolisms, urinary tract infections or pneumonia and die. Nothing to do with lack of sleep, therefore.

Either way, chronic total or partial deprivation can have serious health consequences. “It is necessarily a risk, both physically and mentally,” asserts Dr. Sylvie Royant-Parola, psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders and President of the Morphée network. "After 24 hours without sleep, the first dysfunctions appear," rebounds Professor Arnulf. "Some brain cells go into a dormant state, and their numbers increase with the duration of sleep deprivation."

Intellectual abilities affected

Increasing irritability, the rapid alternation between states of euphoria and depression, burning or tingling sensation in the eyes, visual hallucinations, difficulty speaking, following logical reasoning, remembering recent events, or orienting in time and space... The brain circuits that fail first under the effect of total or partial sleep deprivation are those of attention, concentration, lateral vision, and executive disorders. “People are making more and more mistakes, we see this, especially in everyday tasks”, illustrates Professor Arnulf. “The brain is like slowing down, it hinders decision-making. We see it with our interns: after their night call, they cannot decide to go home in the morning.

"People are making more and more mistakes, we see it, especially in everyday tasks."

In addition to the impact on current performance and mood, lack of sleep also has many physical effects. “The whole cardiovascular system is abused, with variations in blood pressure and heart rate,” says Dr. Royant-Parola, also a member