What does new Netflix thriller Awake
get right about sleep deprivation?
Keep watching to find out.
What happens when you're asleep?
Nothing, right?
Sleep is a time when you're just laid out,
completely inactive waiting for the next day to begin.
For some of us,
sleep can feel like an inconvenience
we have to get out of the way,
so we can focus on important stuff like work and having fun.
Which is why
there's a booming market in energy drinks to keep you awake
and why there are productivity gurus out there
who promise to teach how to survive on the least possible sleep.
But new thriller Awake
shows things falling apart pretty fast
after a mysterious event
stops people from being able to get to sleep.
Things go from bleary
to concerning
to downright frightening
very quickly indeed.
After 48 hours of no sleep
there's a loss of critical thinking.
96 hours; hallucinations, motor failure,
but what about after that? Organs will fail, but then what?
Days of lying in paralysis until the heart shuts off.
Vincent Walsh of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience
at University College London is an expert on sleep.
We spoke to him to find out what's really going on
while you're asleep
and what happens when you don't sleep at all.
The first thing to know, says Vincent,
is that going without sleep is dangerous.
It's possible to survive longer without food
than you can without sleep.
In fact, Guinness World Records
won't recognise efforts to break the record
for staying awake anymore.
The physical toll of the attempt is just too great.
That means,
the record for the longest time without sleep
will probably always belong to American high schooler,
Randy Gardner,
who managed to stay awake for 11 days and 25 minutes in 1964.
As you'd imagine,
Randy's cognitive abilities started to suffer relatively soon.
He couldn't concentrate
and struggled to name common objects.
In a later interview,
Randy said that it felt almost like early Alzheimer's.
but the longer he stayed awake, the more disturbing things became.
He experienced hallucinations, he had delusional episodes,
he became paranoid
and believed a radio host was attacking him.
In fact, if you stay awake long enough,
the effect is indistinguishable from psychosis.
That's because, as Vincent says, sleep isn't just a passive process.
It's actually the time
when your body does its housekeeping.
While you're asleep,
your body is hard at work clearing out toxins,
repairing damage, and resetting all your systems.
So every time you get inadequate sleep
your body, and your brain, get just a bit more degraded.
Over long periods of sleeplessness,
you'll feel that in a few obvious ways.
It... it's 1,500 miles away.
I think it's 150 miles.
I don't know, we haven't slept in four days.
Your coordination will be one of the first things
to start to fail.
Which is one of the reasons why you're advised not to drive
or operate heavy machinery when you're tired.
The danger isn't that you'll fall asleep at the wheel,
it's that even when you're awake you won't be fully in control.
Another thing that happens
is that your body stops being able to regulate its temperature.
That's particularly bad news
because it's going to make it even harder to get to sleep,
trapping you in a vicious cycle.
You're also likely to suffer strange skin sensations
and itching when you're very tired.
Oh my God.
Because your hormones don't get the chance to reset,
your body's internal messages will start to go haywire
in other ways.
When you're sleep deprived,
it's harder to tell when you're full,
and so, you're more likely to eat too much.
That might be one of the reasons
why shift workers are more likely to be overweight.
Sleep is the time
when your body repairs the damage to your muscles
that builds up over the day.
So, if you're not sleeping,
you're not going to be able to recover from injuries
and gradually, things will become worse and worse.
Your muscles essentially start to waste away
when you're not sleeping.
This applies to your organs too,
including your skin.
No amount of moisturiser can compensate
for the effects of fatigue.
Chronic sleep deprivation even affects your fertility.
That's true for women,
and for men,
who can see their sperm count fall by more than 25%.
In other words,
sleeplessness works to impair all your basic functions.
So if you're under any performance pressure at all,
says Vincent, it's just going to fall apart.
What happened?
The car's in the lake.
And while all this is happening, what's going on in the brain?
Well, the picture there is even more troubling.
Right now your brains are slowly swelling.
Our cranial walls are impressing on the brain
and it's affecting critical thinking.
Because you're not sleeping,
obviously you're not dreaming either.
But that doesn't mean you have a firm grasp on the world.
As your perceptual systems flounder,
the difference between illusion and reality,
and eventually the difference between hallucination and reality,
blurs.
When you're profoundly sleep deprived,
you can't trust your own senses.
Memory is one of the most noticeable things
to suffer.
Maybe you've had your own experience
of all-night revision sessions
in which you seem to learn nothing at all,
despite hours of work.
That's because sleep is fundamental to embedding memories
and it's also the time
when your memory system can clean out toxins
so it's ready to function again.
In fact, when you're tired
it's pretty much impossible to learn anything new.
It also affects your impulse control.
When you're tired,
you're more likely to say yes to things you know are bad for you.
So, if you're trying to build good habits,
whether that means going to the gym,
cutting back on alcohol, or improving your diet,
one of the best ways to give yourself a head start
is to begin with a decent night's sleep.
Your interactions with other people will start to go downhill.
Sleep helps you regulate your emotions
and the more tired you are,
the more likely you are to perceive other people
as a threat.
After a few days of sleep deprivation,
that can merge into paranoia.
Oh, and because you've also got that trouble with impulse control,
you're more likely to react when you feel threatened.
Which means that you're more likely
to fall out with people when you're tired.
-...will you calm down. -Is that what you want?
Because unless you people wake up,
that is exactly what is going to happen.
Long term sleep deprivation
has strong associations with dementia and some cancers.
In the end,
the cost of sleeplessness on your body and mind
are very serious indeed.
And even if the direct consequences don't get you,
the increased chances of having an accident,
falling out with loved ones, or making bad decisions,
are all likely to make your life worse
if you're tired all the time.
Paradoxically, some of those risks might actually be worse
when you're slightly sleep deprived
than when you're extremely sleep deprived,
says Vincent.
If you only spelt for five hours,
you'll probably be well aware that you feel terrible
and need to take it easy.
But if you've had six hours,
well then, you might think that you'll be just about okay
behind the wheel of a car,
or having that difficult conversation
with a co-worker.
And that's when things might really start to go wrong.
But, says Vincent, there's no need to panic.
You don't need to sleep perfectly all the time to stay healthy
and your body can catch up from the occasional bad night.
What you can't do
is stay up all the time indefinitely.
Just ask Randy Gardner or the characters of Awake.
Available to watch now on Netflix.
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