YouTubecontent creatorNorme recently attempted to break the 1964 world record for staying awakeafter streaming for over 264 hours. However,Guinness World Records no longer monitors this category, so Norme put himself in harm’s way to break a record that doesn’t even exist anymore, and he was already beaten by Robert McDonald in 1986. It might have put him in the spotlight for a couple of weeks, but you should definitely not try this at home—nobody should, especially not for clout.
Insomnia And Sleep Deprivation Are Serious And Shouldn’t Be Exploited For Views
Sleep deprivation is horrifying, and making light of it for content is beyond insulting. Sinking into your bed for a night’s sleep only to find yourself unable to control your own body istormenting.Your eyes are shut and you’re ready to finally wind down after a long day, but all of a sudden everything screams at you to wake up, a feeling that persists for hours while the clock ticks and ticks until finally you look and see that it’s 3am. Insomnia leaves you ragged, lacking energy and motivation, as you sluggishly drag yourself through the day, exhausted from the start. But when it comes to hitting the bed the next night, your mind jolts back awake. There’s a good reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.
Now imagine that for years on end, never being able to conquer something that for everyone else is a basic fact of life. So many people take sleep for granted, but it doesn’t come easily to us all.
I’ve dealt with insomnia for as long as I can remember, suffering regular, unwilling all-nighters, missing sleep for days, and only getting two to five hours a night for months. I’ve hallucinated at work, gone into states of dangerous disassociation, and struggled to read the most basic words as everything blurs together into an incomprehensible sludge. Things have improved as I’ve spent years in therapy, but I can still feel the raw wound of my insomnia—my sleep schedule is a mess, my memory is unreliable, and so much of the past ten years is muddied or completely blacked out. Most of my childhood is a mystery to me now.
The Impacts Of Not Sleeping For 260 Hours
When you don’t get at least the minimum amount of sleep you need to function, it doesn’t just impact you in the moment. It leaves long-lasting side effects that will haunt you for the rest of your life, which is why Guinness World Records stopped monitoring the category altogether. I’ve dealt with such side effects firsthand, but I wanted to get a professional opinion to shine a light on just what 11 days of no sleep might do to a person so that you can truly understand the gravity behind what Norme might have done to themselves. So, I reached out to Loughborough University researcher and sleep scientistRui Pereira, who holds a PhD in sleep psychology in athletes.
“Staying awake for this period goes far beyond anything considered remotely healthy or even acceptable,” Pereira tells me. “Short-term effects will be a multitude of psychophysiological levels. A degree of cognitive impairment is very likely on a variety of crucial functions. Memory may be affected, with working memory first, but also potentially more elaborate aspects such as the ability to retrieve old memories or form new ones. Attention deficits may be expected, as well as impaired decision-making abilities.
Reaction times may also be severely affected. Emotionally, an impact on mood is very likely and can be reflected by a lower threshold to frustration and an increase in irritability. Feelings of depression and anxiety are also quite common after one night of poor sleep, which would suggest those to be highly exacerbated in this context. There is a final cognitive element of relevance in the emergence of potential hallucinations (both visual and auditory) and feelings of paranoia, which may interplay even with the hallucinations to create a ‘snowball-like effect’.”
These are just the mental effects. Your physical body also takes a toll from sleep deprivation as you need regular sleep to re-energise and repair; “Motor coordination would be a natural consequence, as well as a weakened immune system and a dysregulation of a series of bodily functions (hormonal; metabolic) that may increase the risk of eventual health issues, such as food disorders or cardiovascular problems,” Pereira explains. “Finally, it is expected (and it seems to be happening already, in this case) for the body to engage in involuntary periods of microsleep, a natural occurrence for someone with one night of sleep deprivation, and thus more expected in this case.”
A recenttweet from Normesuggests his body is already feeling some physical effects, as a strange rash has appeared on his arm.
Moments of microsleep are another reason why the Guinness World Records no longer monitor the category. They would outright disqualify you because they break the chain of no-sleep, but they’re incredibly difficult to accurately pinpoint. That means that even if this was still a documented category, Norme would have likely failed.
The Long-Term Side Effects
The long-term effects are the real danger of such prolonged sleep deprivation and are the main reason why you should not, under any circumstance, try to break this record. At the cusp of winning, the euphoria of pulling it off after so long as we saw with Norme,followed by the lengthy and deserved sleep after, might make it all feel worthwhile, but it can leave a permanent mark.
“The impact on the immune system may translate to long-lasting diseases,” Pereira says. “Long-lasting mental health disorders, rooted in anxiety and depression, may also occur and persist. This scenario also promotes a level of vulnerability to neurodegenerative diseases. The ability to sleep may also be severely compromised, with a potential increase in the vulnerability to sleep disorders (e.g., chronic insomnia)”.
Even Three Days Without Sleep Is Dangerous
Predicting what will happen to Norme specifically just from watching his streams is difficult, because there thankfully aren’t that many case studies to pull from. But wecanbreak down what would happen if you were to attempt this.
Most people will have had an all-nighter at some point in their life, whether that’s from a long gaming session with their mates or because they’re swamped with work and university deadlines. You probably know how awful that feels the next day, but imagine going beyond one night into three.
At this point, you may begin to hallucinate and lose touch with reality, suddenly unable to trust your own mind. Not only are you now wracked by untold exhaustion, but bombarded with images that feel as real as the seat you’re sitting on. Human figures walk just out of vision in the corner of your eye, sneaking around your home and watching you from the shadows. They’re not real, but… how can you be sure? Your reasoning begins to slip, the lack of sleep putting weight behind these illusory figures. Someone has broken into your house. You’re in danger. This is real, it must be.
You Are Putting Yourself At Serious Risk If You Try This
Things only get worse after night three, with these side effects growing in intensity until eventually, “a serious life-threatening scenario may take place”. Norme continued foreight more days—he’s lucky he appears to be safe. Over the years of suffering from insomnia, I’ve felt the punches of my heartbeat wailing against my tightening chest even with scraps of sleep, I can’t imagine going nearly two weeks without any.
The five minutes of brief internet fame in a news cycle that moves so fast you’ll be a forgotten blip by next week are hardly worth staking the wellbeing of your own future on, let alone your life.
“I would strongly advise against it,” Pereira tells me. “‘Records’ like these have been discontinued for a reason: they are too dangerous for your health. To even attempt this in one’s home and without any professional supervision is even less advisable. Even for Randy Gardner, the man holding the record while being supervised by William C. Dement (a leading authority in sleep research), there were terrible consequences that lasted for decades.
Gardner developed Insomnia decades after the experiment andbelieves the record was to blame.
“Even if you stood to gain anything from this, it would not compensate for the adverse effects on key bodily functions such as sleep. In short: don’t do it. You’ll severely hurt yourself, it will absolutely not be worth it, and you will come to regret it eventually.”
