Recently I took part in a 24 hour marathon for the video game club in which we play games in the HUB for 24 hours to raise money for charity. I personally did attend most of it, but I did not stay up the full 24 hours of the event and went to sleep for a few hours. Even though the event was for charity, staying up 24 hours without any sleep is not the best idea.
Staying up for 24 hours is not something that is easy to do, since fatigue and lack of energy start to set in when you are active and awake for so long. But sometimes we all stay up later then we should whether it be for an event such as the one I mentioned, or pulling an all nighter for the a big exam the next day or working on a project that is due the next day. But if you stay up for a 24 hour period and you are already a bad sleeper or you don’t get good nights of sleep, you are putting yourself and maybe even others at risk.
This article talks about how a mixture of lack of sleep and then staying up for a long period of time (such as 24 hours) without sleep can be produce a cocktail of trouble in a way. It talks about a certain study that looks at this sleep deprivation: “Staying up for 24 hours straight is bad enough, but the study shows that if you do that on top of having gotten less than six hours of sleep a night for two to three weeks, your reaction times and abilities are 10 times worse than they would have been just pulling an all-nighter” (Weise, 2010). So if you are a person who has trouble getting a good nights rest, staying up for 24 hours only makes your situation worse.
This is a major problem if you work in specific fields of work that require you to be awake for long periods of time. Without sleep, work performance suffers and the person doing the work can not do it to the best of their ability or in worse case scenarios could be a danger to the people around them. In fact, the article also says that staying awake for 24 hours in a row for multiples days can impair a persons performance that is almost or just as bad as being under the influence of alcohol if you are driving.
So make sure to get some Z’s before you get yourself into some trouble.