The price of not sleeping for 200 hours
As early as 1959, people had already guessed this. At that time, Peter Tripp, a well-known Radio program host in the United States, conducted an experiment of not sleeping for two hundred hours in order to raise funds for the Foundation for The Deformed Children, and hosted a radio program while staying awake. He moved into a glass-filled studio in New York's Times Square, allowing millions of people to witness how sleep deprivation can change a person's personality.
As each sleepless night passes, one can hear Tripp's personality shift. Although sleep deprivation has been a well-known form of torture since ancient times, until the late 1950s, little was known about the importance of sleep. In the end, the impact of this "wakefulness marathon" on Tripp far exceeded everyone's expectations.
Peter Tripp, who was only thirty-two years old at the time, was a typical radio host before conducting the experiment. He is smart, optimistic, always smiling and joking. But by the third day of the experiment, he became so irritated that he would curse into the microphone and humiliate others when he got the chance. From the fourth day on, he began to hallucinate, he saw rats running around and spiders crawling into his shoes, and his behavior became more and more paranoid and hostile, even thinking that the doctors responsible for taking care of his health were plotting to frame him and sometimes attack them.
By the last day, Tripp could no longer distinguish between reality and hallucinations, and the doctors asserted: "He has lost his mind." "For the last sixty-six hours of this wakefulness marathon, he had to take medication to stay awake and hold out until the end. After the experiment, he slept for twenty-two hours, and when he woke up, the first thing he did was ask, "Where is the newspaper?" ”
But after that event, Tripp's life began to decline, perhaps unrelated to sleep deprivation or the stimulants he was taking at the time. In fact, Tripp went on to be one of the main figures in the 1960 "Payola" scandal, and he and several DJs accepted tens of thousands of dollars from record companies to illegally play certain songs on the show.
Stupid people sleep until six hours?
Lack of sleep can have a huge impact on a person's personality, leading to irritability, depression, anger, anxiety, and depression, and this does not have to happen without sleeping for several nights in a row, as Tripp did. In fact, as long as there is frequent lack of sleep, it can lead to the same situation. If a person is tired to death, but still works overtime at night, party or exercise, continues to work the next day in the case of severe sleep deprivation, and spends a new day reusing coffee and other refreshing items (e.g., adrenaline), he will become another person, and it is certain that he will not be a better person.
Christian Cajochen, a time biologist at the University of Basel, points out:
"If a person sleeps only six hours for ten consecutive nights, his ability to work, his reaction speed, his memory or his judgment is equivalent to one thousandth of the alcohol concentration in his blood." Still, many people boast that they usually only need to sleep six hours or less. Politicians or business leaders, in particular, such as Obama, Merkel, and Putin, have said similar things. Today, low levels of sleep seem to be a prerequisite for being a supervisor. "Do you really want to be ruled by 'drunks'?"
Napoleon said: "Men sleep for four hours, women sleep for five hours, and fools sleep for six hours." "Didn't this diminutive emperor take a nap so often that his subordinates were always worried that he would fall off his horse while snoozing?" That's it. Even if we cannot know these details for sure, from today's point of view, such a statement is basically wrong, because the Napoleonic rhythm of sleep can be devastating to a person's body and mind.
Chronic sleep deprivation can disrupt a person's genes
Jürgen Zulley, one of Germany's most prominent sleep researchers, has repeatedly exhorted the world over the years that "sleeping too little will make people obese, stupid and sick", hoping to "wake up" those who do not like to sleep, hoping that they will go to bed earlier, or at least sleep longer.
The negative effects of sleep deprivation are not only getting fat, stupid, and getting sick easily, but they can even change a person's personality. A study led by Derk-Jan Dijk at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom showed that if a person is sleep-deprived for an entire week, up to 711 genes are affected. In fact, "sleep deprivation" in this experiment was not an extreme condition, because sixteen subjects slept up to six hours a night for seven nights.
Scientists used blood samples to determine how the subjects' genes looked after they had not slept enough, and based on the proteins found in them (so-called RNA molecules), they could draw conclusions about the activity of the genes. They then compared a blood sample from the same subject after a week of adequate rest. The so-called "full rest" here means that you can sleep up to ten hours a night, and after ten hours of sleep, they will be awakened, because too much sleep is also not conducive to health. Scientists have found that hundreds of genes have changed, which is about three percent of the twenty-three thousand genes that humans have. In the case of insufficient sleep, the activity of four hundred and forty-four genes becomes lower and the activity of two hundred and sixty-seven genes becomes higher than in the state of adequate rest. Depending on what each gene is responsible for, these changes have positive or negative consequences, respectively.
The genes responsible for the immune system, anti-inflammatory response and the body's stress response are mainly affected. Therefore, lack of sleep not only triggers the risk of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart failure, gastrointestinal diseases and infections, but also increases the likelihood of depression and violent tendencies. In addition, sleep deprivation is certainly fatal. Experiments have shown that rats die without sleeping for two to three weeks. The Japanese even invented a term used to refer to sleep deprivation as death, called "death by overwork."
Sleep badly and lose your temper
Anyone who cares a little about themselves knows that if they don't get enough sleep, they become irritable and unreasonable.
Recently, the scientific community has conducted in-depth research on this phenomenon. People who don't get enough sleep are significantly more likely to feel stressed and irritable than people who get enough sleep.
A few years ago, scientists at Pennsylvania State University in the United States asked their subjects to do some simple concentration tests and observe their reactions in the process. Half of the subjects were allowed to sleep normally before the test, and the other half were required to stay up all night the night before. Then, all the subjects had to subtract a set of four digits by two for ten minutes in a row, such as three nine nine nine, three nine nine seven, three nine nine five, three nine nine three, three nine nine one... The results of the experiment showed that people with insufficient sleep had significantly higher stress levels than those who had enough sleep, and they were also more likely to be anxious, angry, and had a tendency to be depressed.
The less sleep, the more adventurous the behavior
However, the impact of sleep deprivation on a person's personality is far more than just stress sensitivity, they can also become more adventurous and irresponsible. Casino owners also take advantage of this, knowing that tired players will be more courageous to bet. Bright lights, loud noises, windowless spaces, it's all about making gamblers forget the passage of time. These players are also far more tired than they think.
A few years ago, a team of researchers at Duke University, led by Michael Chee, deprived subjects of sleep in a gambling experiment. Before each step, subjects were able to choose whether to improve their chances of winning as much as possible, or whether they preferred to minimize the risk of losing big. If subjects don't sleep overnight, they begin to make bolder decisions, and sleep deprivation makes them more optimistic and adventurous— in other words, they think they're lucky and they're going to make a fortune.
Sleeping less is a form of chronic self-harm
Tripp, the radio host, hallucinated the phenomenon of spiders and mice, showing that sleep deprivation can even lead to symptoms of mental disorders and psychopathy, and this will happen very quickly, as psychologists at the University of Bonn and King's College London have discovered.
Twenty-four hours of sleep alone can cause a healthy person to develop a state similar to a mental disorder or psychosis. Then they will be detached from reality or trapped in hallucinations and illusions, for example, they will think that they have heard some strange sound. Ulrich of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Bonn. Ulrich Ettinger said: "We knew that after a night without sleeping, concentration would be diminished, but we did not expect the symptoms to be so obvious. ”
The dramatic result may be that under lack of sleep, the filtering function in the subjects' brains no longer works. After the subjects stayed awake overnight by watching movies, chatting, playing games and taking short walks, the researchers measured them with "pre-pulse suppression." In this experiment, subjects heard some kind of loud startling sound through their headphones, and the researchers could measure the degree of fright by the intensity of their facial muscle twitches. However, if a slighter sound, or "prepulse," is heard before a loud noise, subjects are usually less frightened because they are prepared for a loud noise. A healthy brain uses this mechanism to protect itself from overstimulation, and it distinguishes between what is important and what is not important. But that doesn't work as well in the sleep-deprived brain anymore. Ettinger said: "This is because of the chaos in the brain! "Subjects became more sensitive to light, color or brightness, and their sense of time, perception and smell of their bodies all changed, and their thinking became jumpy.
If you don't get enough sleep, your social skills will decline
Sleep deprivation can also have an impact on social behavior, not only making people more irritable and irritable, but also unconsciously withdrawing, and even having a repulsive effect in the eyes of others, as one of Matthew Walker's experiments showed.
The director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying the effects of sleep on the brain for more than two decades, accumulating a lot of important knowledge in the process. Walker said it was known long ago that social isolation can lead to sleep disorders, "but it's now proven that the reverse is also true; sleep deprivation makes it easier for people to feel lonely, which in turn is reinforced by the reactions of others." ”
In one of his elaborate experiments, one hundred and thirty-eight subjects were forbidden to sleep all night, compared to other subjects who could sleep freely. The next day, the subjects watch a video in which people keep coming straight toward them. If the subject feels that the other person is too close to them, press the button. The results showed that subjects who lacked sleep felt significantly earlier, and that those who walked toward them felt oppressive to them. In other words, their social openness was much lower than that of the well-sleep-deprived subjects. Compared to subjects who lacked sleep, those who slept enough would bring people on screen closer to themselves by sixty percent. Walker said: "Sleep deprivation can make people tend to avoid others and maintain greater social distancing from others. ”
Without adequate sleep, we can easily become socially unstable and quickly feel lonely because we become less active in areas of our brain that belong to the "mind theory" network, which allows us to understand the behavior and intentions of others and makes us social animals. This network is often less active in those who suffer from loneliness, and the same applies to people with severe sleep deprivation.
Others will obviously perceive this phenomenon as well. In another study, Walker and his colleagues had one thousand and thirty-three subjects watch short videos in which a group of subjects discussed current political issues. Some of the subjects in the film slept too little, while others did not, but the subjects in front of the screen did not know this.
In an unknown state, subjects watching the film felt that the sleep-deprived discussants were lonely, and they were less willing to deal with them. Walker said: "So in a state of sleep deprivation, you will be reluctant to communicate with people. "Lack of sleep can even trigger a vicious cycle of loneliness." The less a person sleeps, the less they want to interact with others. Conversely, when people feel that the other person is less social, it also increases their social isolation from each other, so lack of sleep can make us suffer from loneliness. ”