What Happens When You Don’t Sleep for a Day?

What Happens After 24 Hours Without Sleep?
Most people have pulled an all-nighter at some point or another. While you likely don’t look back upon that sleepless night as a “fun” time, you may not realize what you were putting your body through.

After 24 hours without sleep, you’re cognitively impaired. In fact, at just 17 hours without sleep, your judgment, memory, and hand-eye coordination skills are all suffering. At this point, irritability has likely set in. Beyond feeling tired and groggy, you’re more tense, more emotional, your pain receptors are very sensitive, and believe it or not, your hearing is impaired, too.

Your body responds to this lack of sleep by producing more stress hormones and ceasing glucose metabolism to keep you alert and fueled. By now, your brain has probably entered a state of “local sleep.”

During local sleep, parts of your brain shut down and sleep in waves; while some regions and neurons in your brain are resting, others are active. Local sleep helps your mind recharge in-between the times your body has the chance to rest fully.

When local sleep isn’t enough, your brain begins to shut down in trance-like microsleeps. Microsleeps generally last 15 to 30 seconds, but they come in unnoticeable spells. Microsleeping is like zoning out— you’re completely unaware when it’s happening, and once you zone back in, you’ve realized your brain was just blank for however long you were staring off into space.

Microsleeps occur when your brain can no longer prevent sleep. Local sleep was its attempt to restore itself without real rest, but your mind can only stay active for so long. Once it can no longer keep going, it succumbs and microsleeps.

If your brain shuts down and microsleeps while you’re behind the wheel, it can be dangerous, and possibly deadly to not only yourself but others as well.
What Happens When You Don’t Sleep for a Day?
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