NationStates Jolt Archive

inspired by the 'sleep' thread and hopefully worth a new one:

what are the effects of sleep deprivation on you?

i start seeing moving spots on the wall in my peripheral vision that i think are insects or spiders.

also, my distance/size perception goes haywire for things close-up. it makes typing very difficult as my keyboard looks like it's huge and really far away. the same happens with books and dinner. and it's not a constant thing either so it will sort of loom and retreat alarmingly.

i also hallucinate things that i've been looking at a lot. i remember the first time i stayed up all night for a school project i was hallucinating pie-charts in my cereal and bar graphs in the shower when i was getting ready in the morning. totally creeped me out.

if i've been on the caffeine and taurine i start to go a little bit loopy and spaced and i grin a lot. and if i'm a bit tired but not all-nighter tired i get boundless energy and sillyness, a lot of the most fun i've had has been when i was so tired i should be in bed.

Wanting to sleep? Mostly brain-deadness, but not much other than that. occasionally, I drop dead and faint.

I get pretty defensive, I see spots, I break out in hives, I forget how to spell and my vocabulary suffers......I also have auditory hallucinations.

however, most of it doesn't happen until I am up over 48 hours straight.

When I go a really long time without sleep, as in more than 54 hours or so, I see black cats out of the corners of my eyes. Also, I get somewhat paranoid and extremely jumpy. I get jumpy when I'm just tired, I've had several nights where my neighbors cat kept me up by whining outside their door at 4:00am.

I become Lunatic Goofballs and seek the mud.

Bitchiness. I cannot tolerate any minor annoyance. I'm also a lot less coherent. Thought process goes out the door.

I get some minor physical setbacks like blurred vision, poor circulation and other things I can't think of right now. Mostly my overall ability to perform on a day-to-day basis is hindered greatly.

I've never really gone past 24 hours without sleep so I don't know how bad I can get. But usually when I'm stressed and tired I start to zone out, become easily frustrated, and occasionally get insomnia. Also I become highly agressive. Anyone who is in anyway making it longer for me to get some sleep, I will yell at until they go away or in the case of my brothers start attacking them.

I get very, very silly. I act more drunk when I'm sleep deprived than when I have actually have been drinking. I've been known to make strange random statements and conduct arguments with inanimate objects as to if it had just moved or not.

I become hyper-paranoid and begin twitching/leaping in fear/attacking the nearest object whenever I hear a noise. That along with the hallucinating objects and spots on the walls....makes for an interesting experience. If you were the one watching me that is.

Im seeing the spots already, I had better finish my essay and stop posting on NSG...

Dopeyness, vivid hallucinations, have a hard time seeing a source of light (a fog of the light's color forms around it), become able to not think, longer attention span. That's about it.

I see little people in the spaces inside and around the letters on printed pages. Tiny little people, waving at me.

I love the sleep deprived feeling. Sometimes I'll just miss a night's sleep so I can feel really tired.

Right now I'm dealing with protracted sleep deprivation. Massive paper-work, combined with a gigantic load of work for classes and my employer has caused me to achieve a nightly average of four hours for the past month, not counting Thanksgiving. I'm hopped up on caffeine at all hours of the day, and I'm probably going to get home for Christmas break and pass out for a million continuous hours, totally missing my birthday.

This cold and hacking cough certainly aren't making my life any easier either.

I lose much of my capability to think creatively, though it is only when I am extremely sleep deprived (say, two or three hours in forty-eight hours) that I cannot think coherently.

I get slightly more short-tempered than usual, but only significantly so when it is severe; my capability to feel anything but superficial emotions also weakens.

I gain a capacity to make intuitive leaps, but tend to fail miserably when trying to analyze their basis. As a result, thinking things through tends to get me in trouble.

I see little people in the spaces inside and around the letters on printed pages. Tiny little people, waving at me.

You only see them when you're sleep deprived :D

I get very, very silly. I act more drunk when I'm sleep deprived than when I have actually have been drinking. I've been known to make strange random statements and conduct arguments with inanimate objects as to if it had just moved or not.

Yeah, I'm kinda like this with out the talking to inanimate objects bit. Although I find when I'm only slightly sleep deprived I am a bit beter able to focus on writing papers, either that or its the fact that in such situations I'm usually toeing the deadline. I also seem to have kind of waves of alertness, where I am wide awake despite the lack of sleep.

I get really, really silly at first... I'm a klutz naturally, but it gets worse, and then I just laugh until I'm out of breath and crying. I laugh at nothing, too. My boyfriend will say something completely normal, like, "Oh, the road is busy today," and I'll start laughing hysterically.

I've also experienced visual and auditory hallucinations, but only once - when I was *really* sleep deprived. I felt almost schitzophrenic, basically.

Generally when I'm sleep deprived, though, I end up falling asleep throughout the day. When I was younger, I'd not sleep at night and then not sleep through the day, but now my body can't seem to handle it. I fall asleep in the middle of lectures. I fall asleep in the middle of eating my lunch. I fall asleep on the ride home. I fall asleep basically anywhere, sitting upright with my eyes half-open. :p Thus, I don't stay sleep deprived for more than a couple of days.

Besides, my boyfriend makes me sleep when I start acting loony. :)

I've noticed that most of the term papers I've written for classes that have gotten near perfect scores were written in the last 12 or so hours before they were due, overnight. This doesn't include any necessary research or other such work, of course, but I still appear to have the ability or organize ideas/knowledge and arange them onto paper with a high degree of gramatical accuracy at the last minute and without sleep. :D

This quarter marks the first term paper I've written which will be turned in after a full 8 hours of sleep. I'll probably get an F. :(

I have visual hallucinations when I'm really tired. What's strange about them is that they're NOT what would normally be considered weird. And I don't see them until I finally get into the bed.

Then if I'm quite tired, it's typical for me to see, on the floor in front of the bed, things like:
A lunch bag, or an extra water bottle, or an extra pack of cigs. Totally mundane stuff, a lot of which I usually do have 1 of sitting down there [except the mysterious brown lunch bag]. And the duplication won't appear carbon-copied right next to it, but placed semirandomly--just like it really would be if I actually had 2 of the item in the area.

These will look 100% real and sometimes will persist even after being subjected to the test of trying to grab them (I'll actually see my hand pass through the "object.")

I don't think I get auditory hallucinations--either that or I've mistaken them for the normal house creaking/settling...who knows, maybe my brain really adds some more creaks and pops to the mix to go along with the fake water bottles!

As for acting strange, occasionally I'll get informed that I should go to bed, but when that happens I'm so tired that I have no idea what kind of strange behavior/commentary has brought on that assessment! I do know that it's accurate--I really am exhausted when I'm told that--but not what the outward sign is.

When it comes to being more aggressive, I'm usually not aggressive if I've already been up a long time. But if I'm asleep and someone WAKES me up, they'd be safer if they woke up a bear by poking it in the eye!

The most unexpected thing that ever happened while I was really tired, came not on the day itself. But about 5 days later, a huge bag came from a site I usually shop at, containing an entire fall/winter wardrobe!! The size was right, and the charge was on my credit card, pinpointing the time of ordering as the day I was practically falling asleep on the keyboard. So I infer that I must have decided that it'd be a good idea to buy all that stuff :confused:

I now make it a point to not buy anything (no matter how much it makes sense at the time) while even remotely tired, and I usually even keep my credit cards well away from the computer so I have to at least be alert enough to go get my wallet before hitting that Submit button.

That surprise package event was weird but fortunately, such costly things are highly unusual for me!

When I miss a night's sleep, I become suave and charming, chatting to girls in a confident and flirtatious manner. I lose just the right amount of inhibitions to avoid seeming overly shy while not appearing boorish. I'm cool!
Then I fall unconscious and bash my head on a table, and the girls I was chatting to end up calling the paramedics.

Tiredness.

Depends on how far

The first 36 or so just mood changes

36 - 64 giddyness

64 + ... well lets just say I ended my 96 hour stretch curled in a floor rug sucking on a vacuum cleaner hose saying it tasted like red russet potatoes

i also start talking to myself, sort of giving a running commentary of what i'm doing and what i need to do. and i get more flamboyant in my movements. people often think i'm high when i'm tired. and i get the reduced inhibitions too. in fact, i think being over-tired is a lot like being stoned for me, not so much fun though. if it's someone else keeping me awake then i do get irritable and snappy.

I transcend to a strange plane of existence I call Blaaaarf.

I usually just get really tired some of the time and am fine the rest of it...the best thing I can do to stay awake is to stay active. Sitting around doing nothing is bad for me; getting up and doing something is good.

On the way back from NYC from a conference in college, we drove overnight...and I drove from about midnight to 4 AM. On no sleep. They pretty much had to drag me out of the driver's seat, but I managed to stay awake for another 21 hours...after my friends stupidly allowed me to drive to one of their houses for Easter. I had to slap myself in the face to stay awake.

The worst part is drifting into weird dreamlike states. Reality influences the dreams, but it's akin to being in church and believing you're at a fish market, and every time the pastor says "Christ" you hear a fishmonger saying "Price." At least I wasn't driving at the time.

I look kinda stoned and feel really tired untill I do some strenuous physical activity, which seems to give me a huge energy boost. I apparently still look stoned though. People including my dear mother will ask me if I've been smoking something or I have a hangover :D

I get cranky, at first anyway. Once when I was a teenager my older brother thought it'd be cute to continually knock on my bedroom door after I'd been up about 36 hours. I got him by the throat and squeezed until he passed out then dropped him to the floor.

If I stay up for longer than that I just can't stay awake, any time I sit down I'm apt to fall asleep, and even while "awake" I'm at best only semi-conscious.