We Stayed Awake For 36 Hours And It Changed Our Faces

So we read this book called Why We Sleep. You know, the thing so many of us crave but can never seem to get enough of. The book makes it clear that a lack of sleep can affect everything from your mental health, cognitive abilities, immune system, and basically every aspect of your life. But the irony is that we don't fully understand why we, or any animal for that matter, sleeps. We just know that without it, most species slowly deteriorate. This is one scenario that honestly happens to me all the time, and I'm sure happens to you as well. You're getting ready for your day. You shower, you polish your pearls, you get your coffee, and you do whatever else it takes to get your brain and body moving, only to have the first person you encounter say, oh honey, you look tired. Which got us wondering about the idea of beauty sleep. Like, does sleep deprivation play an intrinsic role in the way that we look? So, we are gonna stay awake for the next 36 hours and document and take progress pictures of every stage. Here are the rules of our experiment. We'll take photos every six hours. We've set up a dark corner in our house so we can control the lighting as best as possible. No makeup or facial touch-ups though. No napping, which is honestly gonna be really hard for us. And finally, we're allowed to have our normal morning coffee, but after that, absolutely zero caffeine. And at the end of the 36 hours awake, we are gonna see just how messed up we look. We have this set up to help us measure exactly where we go. So we can have the same photo each time. No expressions so that we can match it evenly. A little fact about me, the last time I pulled an all-nighter, the second I went to bed, I pissed the bed. I was 18 years old. You were 18? I was old. Woke up, peed the bed, was so embarrassed that I took all my sheets and I threw it into a backyard somewhere I never told my parents. And they were like, did I put sheets down? I was like, no. So, obviously the first 14 hours or so were pretty standard. We woke up at 8 a.m. and then just had to go on living our normal lives while taking pictures every six hours. But for whatever reason, because we knew we had to be up all night, we were feeling way more tired than normal. I'm so tired. How are you so tired? Because I nap in the afternoon. Wait, what time is it now? Six. And you're so tired. I don't think I can do this. Did you know that 386 billion square feet of cardboard is made each year? Doesn't that seem absurd? To kill some time and keep busy, we took the dog for a walk and then went to the office for some science. You know, scientists actually don't really know why we look so messed up when we don't sleep. But there are two specific theories that evolutionary biologists have. And we are gonna explain them today using tired 3D printed Greg. It doesn't stay. F**k. Oh no, it ran out of tape. Oh my God. Okay, wait, I can do this. So this is tired Greg. Boo, he's ugly. And this is not tired Mitch. The first theory is that since Greg is sleep deprived, he is more prone to accidents. Ow, ow, great lady, ow, ow. And tired Greg also has a weakened immune system. Cough, cough. Thankfully, Greg's face is perceived as less attractive and less socially appealing. Therefore, untired, happy, happy Mitch knows to avoid Greg at all costs. The second theory is that tired Greg is likely less optimistic and less good at showing emotions, which makes sense because his face is frozen. In this tired state, his busted face is signaling for Mitch to stay away so that he can be alone and not piss people off and get some sleep until he looks better and is finally able to talk to people again. Yay! These lights are helping. Fasting, but now I just shut my eyes and now I'm ready to go to sleep. Okay Mitch, why did you read it? Wait. We just finished recording a podcast. We decided we needed something to keep us busy. What was the podcast about? Oh, the podcast is about sleep deprivation. Oh! What do you know? It was insane. Our brains are completely shut off. We did talk about some cool other studies, so if you wanna listen to the podcast, we'll put a link in the description. I feel like I'm going crazy because now that they're done the podcast, my brain's slowly melting. We're not usually up this late. Another six hours had passed, so we came home to take some photos. Okay, so it is currently 4.15 a.m. I actually don't feel so, so tired, but what I am noticing is that my cognitive ability is definitely slowing down. We wanted to acknowledge the fact that my memories are not actually being formed properly. So, I had this beautiful brain here. The fact is, when you're sleep deprived, anytime you're trying to learn or remember something, this is a lot harder to do than I thought because I had learned this, but now I am having a hard time recalling it and saying it, and there's a lot of things happening at once that don't usually happen in an ASAP Science video. So, anytime you're trying to learn something, an area in your brain called the hippocampus is really active. It's basically like taking in all the information and processing it for you, but when they look at brain scans of people who are sleep deprived, the hippocampus is basically off. On top of that, the proteins that are actually required to build connections between neurons are no longer available when you're overtired, and so, effectively, it's really hard to even make a memory physically. Studies have actually found that people who are sleep deprived are around 40% less efficient at remembering things. That's like the difference between literally acing an exam or failing it miserably. So, if you're watching this video and perhaps you're cramming for an exam, procrastinating, I'm begging you, it's really worth it for you to go to sleep because you really aren't making any solid memories right now. How do you feel? I'm so tired. It's just like kind of fuzzy. Fog, right? Foggy. I can't stop looking in the wrong place. I made this mold in an art class and I made it to make an art piece about how my obsession with celebrity is a way that I cope with making art. Some things never change. Should be in the mold, but it's not in the mold. Then things got a little weird. What are you doing? I discovered TikTok. Wait, how do you have text on top of it? I wanted to be homo sapiens, a homo neanderthalensis. Oh my God, Greg, you're insane. And then it happened. The sunlight is beaming through the room. Sunrise, I literally can't even think properly right now. I am having a second wind. Are you actually? Or third wind or fourth wind, I don't know, I'm awake. I feel good. I'm happy to see the sun. Hey there, bed, you bring all life to us on earth. The world's coming alive. Literally the second we came out here, there's planes going over, there's alarms going off. We're in the city. Oh man, what am I talking about again? So both Greg and I at this point in the morning are actually kind of feeling a little bit energized. Like I'm still tired and cloudy, but weirdly have a second wind and it goes with some interesting science. One of the main reasons that you get really tired is because something in your brain builds up called adenosine over time. And the only way to really get rid of it is by either drinking coffee because it blocks the adenosine receptors in your brain or by going to sleep. Obviously we have not gone to sleep. So we have a lot of adenosine building up. But the other main factor is your sleep cycle and your circadian rhythm. So as the sun comes up, your body actually just starts to produce hormones that are in sync with the daylight, which wakes your body up. So in this case, even though our adenosine levels are really high, as the sun's coming up, our bodies are actually waking up a bit. And as a result, we have sort of like a little up moment, but we are probably going to crash really hard later on as that cycle kind of phases out in the afternoon for us. Okay. Oh, you're going to. As our morning hormones that were acting as uppers began to wear off, we had to take another photo and then it was the home stretch. This is awful. I need to go back to bed. Yeah. This is really, really bad. This is the worst. I don't know that I've ever really made it this far before without like having some serious thing I had to push for and then immediately crashing after. I haven't had any visual hallucinations, which is a good thing. No, not at all. I definitely have had just like major lapses though where we're talking. Oh, look at that butterfly. Imagine. Oh. I'm getting visual hallucinations that you would get. Wow. I can't even speak. The visual hallucinations that you, oh my God, that you would get would just be like fuzzy little lines. It wouldn't be a butterfly. I don't think we'll reach that. The only thing that could help us get through at this point was mindless, but active video games, as well as scrolling social media. I can't help, but notice you're looking awfully cozy over here. I need to shut up. You're right. I shut my eyes for literally three seconds. You literally look so tired to me. Go look at yourself in the mirror. No, that's so weird. There's something in my eye. Oh my God. If I saw me right now, I would be like, you're sick. Oh my God. We did it. Okay. Don't look at me. I'm freaking ugly. This better have been worth it. We finally took the last photos and then went straight to bed. So we've had a chance to rest, and now we have the photos ready for us to see how bad we look. It kind of feels like the whole thing was like a dream. I honestly don't really remember the whole thing. So we'll know it once we've rewatched the video. But now I feel refreshed. That's why we look so snatched. Ready? Oh my God. Oh no. I look like I'm crying. Yeah, you do. Like your eyes are so much smaller and you can see that your eyes are red, I think. I literally look like I have just been crying or I just found out that everyone I love has died. I'm actually more pale in the right one, which is rare for me. I have a very red face. Oh my God. I look so sad. Like my whole face is inflamed. Actually. I look literally busted. But also the one on the left looks really mean. You do have a kind of an intense straight face. I 100% would stay away from the person on the right. I really would. Ah! I look absolutely pissed off in the more tired version. Yeah, you look sad. Even in my forehead, you can see I'm kind of like wrinkling my eyes, probably because I'm like trying really hard to keep them open. Yeah, they say they're supposed to from not sleep, get wrinkles, render eyes. That's maybe what they mean. I didn't know what they meant by that. To be honest, you don't look that bad. Like you're an attractive person. I think anyone would be able to say that's a tired person and that's not. Yes, and I would way rather hang out with the person on the left. And on the left, you look hot. And on the right, I think you look hot, but I'm also just like a little bit worried like about you. A good takeaway from all of this for you is that, yes, if you want to look good for your wedding, for a date, for one of those photo shoots where you like hug a pumpkin, it's important to get a good night's sleep. And as some people might say, you do need to get your beauty sleep. Thank you guys for watching. We actually haven't posted a video in about three months or so. Took a bit of a break and we've been thinking about trying different formats of videos and stuff. So hopefully you enjoyed this one. And we also just released a podcast about sleep deprivation with a lot more studies. It was filmed while sleep deprived. So it's kind of messy, but it's very entertaining. We'll put a link below that you can click on or search for it. It's called Side Note. Thanks again for always watching and supporting our videos. Make sure to subscribe if you're new and we'll see you soon for a new video.