Table of contents:
- When staying up late 24 hours
- After staying up late 36 - 48 hours
- After 72 hours of staying up late….
Normally, the recommended sleep time is around 7-8 hours per night. Are you curious about what is going on in your body while you stay up all night for an office project presentation, or rush over a thesis deadline?
Staying up late has serious consequences for your health, both physically and psychologically - and although your symptoms will worsen the more you stay up late, the health problems resulting from lack of sleep can start to appear from the first time you stay up late.
When staying up late 24 hours
There have been many studies conducted to test the cognitive effects of the brain due to staying up late for less than 48 hours. The biggest effect that can have on your body after staying up all night (or even longer) is that your ability to focus and concentrate drops off dramatically, according to the findings of a 2010 study in Psychology Bulletin. Researchers conducted 147 different cognitive tests on participants who had stayed up late 24-48 hours earlier. They found that the “simple alertness”, aka your ability to focus on one stimuli at a time (someone speaking, for example, or a song played), from the participants dropped sharply.
Another study also found that staying up late had an effect on the brain's ability to focus as well as having a blood alcohol content of 0.10 percent.
At this point, your brain is still able to function to remember pretty well. Likewise, your brain works to focus on more complex things, such as sorting things in an organized system or rearranging lists of names. However, your eye-and-hand coordination will start to deteriorate, and some difficult mental processes will become overwhelmed. According to a 2011 study, staying up late for 24 hours will make you less effective at making certain decisions.
Your brain will also find it more difficult to sift any relevant information from the pile of information you receive. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that, after staying up all night, an individual is far less able to filter out irrelevant stimuli, leading to confusion over the absorption of so much new information.
In addition, your body will also react slowly. A study that focused on college athletes found that participants who had stayed up all night were still able to show fairly good athletic ability, but their reaction time interval was quite poor.
After staying up late 36 - 48 hours
Your cognitive abilities will drop sharply, you may not be able to remember faces very well, and your ability to remember words or phrases will decrease significantly. One study found that things like suppressing inappropriate responses, constructing verbs from nouns, and using visual memory - all complex cognitive skills - were completely destroyed after 36 hours of non-stop staying up late in young adults. .
Your current immune system will be much different when compared to people who get enough sleep. The level of NK white blood cells, the most important part of the body's immune response system, will drop significantly in people who stay up late for 48 hours straight. But don't worry, these white blood cell levels will return to normal once you get your sleep back.
A study conducted on healthy young adults who stayed up late for 48 hours showed unusually high nitrogen levels in their urine samples. That is, their bodies are dealing with tremendous stress. This shows that the immune system is not working effectively in responding to infection or recovering from a disease.
Your action-reaction process at this point will be seriously disrupted. A group of researchers from Columbia University examined the cognitive impairment of study subjects who stayed up late for 48 hours, and found their ability to react quickly was severely impaired. The effect of a slow body reaction is to interfere with your ability to protect yourself from harm.
After 72 hours of staying up late….
Even daily conversation becomes a very difficult task for you.
Your motivation for life will also decrease, and it is not impossible that you can experience strange experiences, such as visual illusions or hallucinations, but not until the stage of psychosis.
One thing is certain, you will experience microsleep. This condition occurs when the brain suddenly “falls asleep” for a short time, usually only a few seconds, then jolts back up again. Of course this will endanger your safety, as well as those of others around you, especially if it happens when you are driving or operating large machinery.
