We have all experienced the moment were we wish we had extra time to study or finish an assignment, but our body needs sleep to function, so the night time hours are lost or are they?
What if we didn’t need any sleep to function and we had all the 24 hours in a day? We, well I in this case, would probably miss the sleep because it makes me happy, but what would happen to your body if you stay up for 24 hours, or longer? That’s a challenge I’m willing to try and conveniently I have an exam coming up, so the perfect opportunity to test it out.
I am not the only person in the world who is interested in finding out what happens to your body, and since I am not a doctor I do not know the specifics of what happens on your insides, but a study has claimed that saying awake for a longer period of time will have the same effects on your body as 0,10 percent alcohol in your blood.
The Sunday has arrived to test out what is going to happen to my body, will I survive or will I fall apart? After my 3PM nap I was ready to stay up all night. I started the evening like any other, a peaceful dinner with myself and my study books. A real sportsman would not take any performance enhancers but I failed, around 12PM I started to get tired and my first coffee was made. The positive side to this was that coffee was my only performance enhancer, I did not cheat any further. I do not like to mention how many coffees were made that night, but I needed to buy new coffee the next morning.
After 3PM I started to get wide awake, at this point I think I was beyond my sleep and was still studying, I decided it was time to take a break and do something else for a while. This resulted in me baking a cake and hoping my roommates wouldn’t wake up form my mixer. The clock strikes 6AM and I had eaten a cake and watched some Netflix, I was still awake and alive and decided to take a shower to wake myself up since my eyes began to feel tired. I was surprised at how easy I had gotten through the night, I was now awake for 15 hours and the only issues I encountered were tired eyes and yawning, lots of yawning.
In theory I needed to stay awake for 9 more hours, from 5:30PM till 7PM I had an exam so I was forced to stay awake for 13 more hours.
My first sight of the outside world was around 12PM since I had a tutorial scheduled and afterwards more studying. I started to notice that my hands were kinda shaky and my eyesight turned blurry at times, but that could also be because of the fact that I wore my lenses longer than I was supposed to.
When talking to my friends I had a hard time making sense of my words, and when reading something my brain had trouble understanding what I actually read. It felt like my body was forcing me to go to sleep at 4PM, my eyes were barely open and my body felt heavy. After some food and a pep talk, I felt better and rocked my exam. To my surprise I was fully focused during the exam, also because I, of course, studied as the good student I am.
When I was looking for my keys at the front door, all I could think about was my bed. When I eventually got up to my room and actually laid in bed around 8PM, i could not sleep. It took me a while to actually fall asleep, but it was the best sleep I ever had.
I do think my body dislikes me now and I won’t do this experiment again anytime soon, eventually I was awake for about 29 hours and I am still alive. Overall the experiment was interesting, research online said that there are a few risks with staying awake, but that was mostly for staying awake for longer period of times, so if you ever think of doing this, please be careful. After all, I only experienced some mild issues such as shaky hands, lots of yawning to the point where it got very annoying, trouble with my eyesight and concentration and speech issues.
So it is possible to pull an all nighter, just don't die.