Quote:
Originally Posted by jumpy
What the hell do you do that needs you to be awake for that long? 
Hopefully it's not anything that requires you to either a) drive b) operate machinery c) have anything that needs more than a half hour of concentration at a time d) be responsible for the safety of others working around you.
I've spent plenty of time in the past with, shall we say, extended patterns of waking and sleeping. When staying awake for more than 24 hours at a time followed by a sleep period of less than 8 hours and repeating, auditory and visual hallucinations and lapses of judgement are always very close by, plus I experience a very short temper and a marked decrease in ability to think clearly and to complete complex tasks.
Shift work with those kind of patterns can be done by sheer willpower alone, but it messes your health up long term; your body and brain have evolved to a day/night cycle for a very good reason. It's another reason sleep deprivation is used to break people down.
I'd be quite concerned with that kind of pressure, unless you're getting amphetamines or something... Not having a dig at you, fella, but that kind of sleep pattern is really not good for you. |
I work as a security guard at a natural sciences building of a university. By the end of about 30 hours of no sleep my mental capacity has indeed diminished, but not to a high degree, like say I were to take a test at the beginning of my shift and then take the same test at the end I usually do about 3 or 4 points worse on the later test. Add on another 18 hours and the score usually drops by about 15 points and after that it goes down hill quite rapidly. I haven't gotten hallucinations before about 70 hours of wake time.
Before this I served as a recon infantryman, not quite special forces, but as close to one gets while doing their national service here. At one point during basic they had us take an iq test after we had finished a 24km patrol in a swamp after spending 16 hours watching an intersection for "enemy" movement. While it was not something you could consider a proper IQ test, i scored 141 like i had under conditions with no fatigue.