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Can You Actually Die From a Lack of Sleep? Here's What Science Says

MIKE MCRAE20 MAY 2018
Today, Randy Gardner is alive and well at 68 years of age, in spite of staying awake for more than 264 hours straight back when he was just 17.

Not only did he set a record for sleep deprivation, Gardner showed you can miss out on shut-eye for more than a week and still not risk an early grave. But before brewing a pot of extra strong coffee, there are a few things you ought to know first.

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After three days, Gardner was getting moody and losing coordination. Bit by bit his senses were being affected, including his smell.

By day five he was hallucinating, his brain slipping into a dream-like state.

Follow-up analyses of Gardner's brain activity found he wasn't quite as fully awake as it appeared, with various parts of the brain shutting down for a siesta from time to time.

While it wasn't a pleasant experience, there is nothing to suggest Gardner's long-term health was in danger.

Where this gets particularly interesting is the fact that those findings are in stark contrast with experiments that had earlier been conducted on sleep-deprived animals (ugh, we know).
In 1898 two Italian physiologists kept dogs awake by constantly walking them over a period of several weeks, until, tragically, they died from what appeared to be degradation of various nerves in the brain and spinal cord.

Similar experiments on rats have also shown that a lack of sleep can be deadly.

But for some reason, humans appear to have evolved neurological tricks similar to those of some birds and aquatic mammals – an ability to shut down parts of the brain for maintenance while sort-of staying awake.

Our ability to slip into microsleep when we push past our limits might have helped us stay alive in the past, possibly in line with other endurance-enhancing adaptations that let us stay on the move for long periods.

Can You Die From Lack of Sleep?
The dangers of being really, really tired.

It’s possible that given enough time, sleep deprivation can kill you. While no human being is known to have died from staying awake, animal research strongly suggests it could happen.
In the 1980s, a University of Chicago researcher named Allan Rechtschaffen conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments on rats. After 32 days of total sleep deprivation, all the rats were dead. Curiously, researchers still do not agree on the cause of death.
It’s possible that the rats’ body temperature dropped so much that they succumbed to hypothermia. Another theory posits that the rats’ immune systems became so depressed that bacteria normally sequestered in their intestines spread throughout their bodies—though Rechtschaffen counters that his rats perished even when they were administered antibiotics.
A third explanation points to some evidence of brain damage among the sleep-deprived rats. It’s also possible that extreme levels of stress contributed to the rats’ demise.

There’s every reason to believe that humans would experience the same end result if they were kept awake for long enough.