How long does it take to get sick from lack of sleep? Is it normal to feel like im going to collapse?
It does vary a bit, and you won’t get physically sick, but for most people 24-36 hours without sleep will start to cause typical sleep deprivation symptoms: Illusions (mistaking an object for something else), hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, memory disturbances and malaise. Caffeine use and any other drug use, for that matter (including smoking) worsen these effects. Strangely, some people are able to go without sleep for long periods of time before the symptoms set in. I’ve gone without sleep for over 72 hours before I started to lose it, but then I really lost it.. near dementia and hallucinations. Philip K. Dick stayed up for weeks, but he was Bipolar, Schizophrenic, suffered from synaesthesia and was a methamphetamine addict. Maybe St. Francis of Assisi is a better example. Disturbing the sleep pattern denies the brain of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep which is necessary for the brain to process daily (‘Medium term’) memory – REM sorts, discards, stores and flags memories by boun
