Fatigue questions

Last night I stayed up until 6am playing poker, and was getting (after 30 something hours awake) to my usual feeling of...
being itchy all over
everything becomes insanely funny, for no reason!
eyes feel like there is sand inside them
becoming irritable and feeling WARM all over.

I was just wondering if any of you whizzes could tell me why those symptomns kick in when we deprive ourselves of sleep... They are, for the most part, very unpleasant and I don't understand why it all happens!

Reply 1

Silly Wench

1

I think the record for the longest wake-a-thon was about 12 days, so at 30 hours, I wouldn't worry much.

Reply 2

L i b

19

I get paranoia, my neck feels tight and my stomach gets all buggered up.

Can't explain any of it. A bit of an all-round kick in the sack really.

Reply 3

caw123

10

Silly Wench

I think the record for the longest wake-a-thon was about 12 days

And the guy had brain damage afterwards. :eek:

Reply 4

RetiredAccount89

18

RobbieC

Last night I stayed up until 6am playing poker, and was getting (after 30 something hours awake) to my usual feeling of...
being itchy all over
everything becomes insanely funny, for no reason!
eyes feel like there is sand inside them
becoming irritable and feeling WARM all over.

I was just wondering if any of you whizzes could tell me why those symptomns kick in when we deprive ourselves of sleep... They are, for the most part, very unpleasant and I don't understand why it all happens!

your body needs your sleeping time to do stuff like clean up metabolites, release some hormones, stop producing (and so rest) others.
Also muscles need to relax (including those for breathing and your heart) these muscles never will konk out or anything but they do need that relative rest in order to do...housekeeping.

god this is such a simplistic view i feel bad for saying it (and no doubt someone will rip it to shreds) but i cant think of any better way of phrasing it without going really anal!

Reply 5

Silly Wench

1

caw123

And the guy had brain damage afterwards. :eek:

I didn't hear that he had brain damage! Quite a few such things have been done though, surely if it causes so much harm people would be strongly advised not to do it, and psychologists wouldn't spend ages studying it.

When I studied it in psycholgy at college (was a while ago, so may have forgotten a few details), we did a few case studies on people that had spent so long at a time being awake, alot of the time they said when they did eventually sleep they slept for longer than what a usual sleep cycle consists of (eg 16 hours instead of 8) but afterwards they went basically back to normal.

And then there's the view that sleep evolved because of it's survial traits, which basically go along the lines of when it's night, it's dark, you can't see clearly, harder to hunt and more likely to be hunted by predators, so sleep enables you to pass night and not die or something, so if it evolved to keep us busy for a few hours, then surely it's not overly important?

Reply 6

zhivago

2

I never get enough sleep, don't worry about it. I actually think it's quite funny being shattered, I get "drunk on fatigue". Pissed on tiredness.

Reply 7

L i b

19

Ah yes, I used to love staggering into school on zero sleep. Always had entertaining consequences. For some reason, it lowers inhibitions as well (good for shy people...)

The only problem is that I like sleeping (subject to my body's ****ed up patterns) and thus usually fall asleep as soon as I have nothing better to do. As I write this it's 7.34 am and... well... I'd like to stay awake until a reasonably acceptable time, but I get the feeling by about 11am I might have to give up and just go to bed.

Rambling over...

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