What is the longest you've been awake without sleep? When and why did you do it?

50+ hours, when a loved one went into septic shock several years ago (they eventually got better). When they were stabilized and I was finally able to sleep, I just basically said "okay, now is fine" to the darkness creeping in from my peripheral vision every time I closed my eyes and let it finish doing so. I was asleep within a few seconds.

I sometimes get bouts of insomnia. Usually when it happens, I'm just awake for about 30 hours or so. That'll happen once or twice a month for me, and I'm pretty sure is just stress-related.

The longest I've gone was 75 hours when I was in my early 20s, which was due to a really bad allergic reaction to cedar pollen which kept me from breathing while laying my head down in any position, so I couldn't fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. I was also running a pretty high fever while this happened. I probably drifted into microsleeps while sitting up a few times during that, but it was absolutely miserable.

I started having really bizarre auditory hallucinations after about the 40-hour mark. I'd hear a crowd of people laughing from behind the walls. Not like a malicious laugh, but like there was a stand-up routine happening in the next room over. Nobody else was home, no TVs were on, and it was like 3am so I knew what I was hearing wasn't real, but convincing myself of that didn't make the laughter stop.

I think I slept for about 13 hours straight after that.

4-5 days. Hard to tell.

I was 14, it was spring break, the rest of my large overbearing family went on a trip I didn't want to go on, so I had the house to myself and didn't want to waste a single minute.

Heavily fueled by energy drinks, and the auditory hallucinations really started kicking off after day 2. After a while you're not even really tired, just craving a break, it's easy to lose track of when exactly you did something and what day it is. Even still, the involuntary micro-naps started cutting in about halfway through day 4.

I stayed up for over 2 nights but I was on some heavy drugs. Near the end I was hearing voices and there was shadow people in my peripheral vision. I also couldn't put together a sentence , the words would come out in the wrong order .

25h for doing a 100% "speedrun" of Paper Mario: The Origami King 5 years ago.

I was the first one to ever do it so I can say I'm a former world record holder :p

40 hours for me. Work related waste of my life in hindsight. Could have been only 39, but I powered through the last hour to hit the round number.

1994, I was... A manager for Radio Shack. No, I didn't wear bad pants.

My District Manager (DM) promoted me to a larger store from my current store. The other manager was being demoted... To MY store. Which made the whole thing a bit awkward. The other manager and I also were not getting any more help. We literally were going to do the takeover inventories ourselves... both stores.

I got up Saturday morning at 7:30 and got into my store at 8:30am and worked till 6pm, when my store closed. One of my employees said he'd help with my store's inventory, but he couldn't work past 10pm. We entered final counts and started reconcile at 4am. Reconcile is typically left to the manager taking over, but I didn't trust the guy, so we both did the reconcile (comparing what we counted in the store vs what the computer said was in the store and explaining any variances). That was done about 6am, largely because he wanted to dispute items that were at the repair center that I had documented. We then moved to his former, my new store. Which had a much larger inventory. We stopped and picked up breakfast and started counts around 7:30. By this time I had been awake and working for 24 hours.

Inventory of my new store was a fucking nightmare. Counts were WAY off from computer's inventory. Entire computer systems were missing, monitors, a couple of hi-fi receivers. Don't even get me started on force feed. At about noon, I called our DM and said I needed either him, or a senior manager onsite to cover this inventory and some helpers. My DM's lazy ass wasn't about to work on a Sunday, so he sent a senior manager and two employees. The senior manager, someone that I knew and trusted, did reconcile as we finished counts. Boy was the inventory completely screwed. That was just the large items, by 10pm we hadn't even gotten into the force feed items (items hanging on pegs). We finally got counts done at 6am and I signed off on the reconcile around 7:30. The store opened at 9am, but I lived 25 minutes away, so I just freshened up in the restroom, went and bought a case of Cokes and opened the store. I was supposed to have an employee come in at 1pm and another at 5pm...

The employee that was supposed to work from 1pm to close (9pm), decided to just never show up, he was also the other key holder. RS only had two key holders in the store back in those days. The one at 5pm was a part timer and could not close. So I ended up working until 9:30 that night.

I got home at 10pm, made some dinner and got to sleep at 11pm and it was Monday night.

So I was awake from 7:30am Saturday till 11:00pm the following Monday and was at work all but maybe 30 minutes. I think that was about 63.5 hours and I still had the rest of the week to work. It took me about a month to get my sleep schedule back into any semblance of normalcy.

I will starve and die in the gutter, before EVER working retail again.

I’m not sure it was the longest, but most recently I was up over 36 hours straight.

Worked then pulled an all nighter driving to Florida to visit my friend. Got there at 7:30 am and then did a whole day with them before passing out after midnight.

I did a little over 4 days when I was a teenager just to see how long I could go. Really kinda sucked after the first 2 days. But I was just playing video games.

I did many 2-3 day stints in the Army. That sucked way, way more because yeah, I was definitely not playing video games.

I think the longest was 4 days when I was 12/13 as kind of a "I wonder if I can?" I was pretty much neglected as a kid, so I was left up to my own creative paths, and there was a time when I was trying out all kinds of new age stuff of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think one of the things I read about was something experimental called "Delta sleep," where you could get a night's worth of sleep for just 2 hours only. I am sure it was new age bullshit, but "the army is experimenting with this" and so I decided to give it a try, using a biofeedback machine home kit that I had. This led to, among other things, parasomnias, but my record was 4 days with no sleep (roughly 80 hours, so less than 4 days technically).

For lack of a better term, things became "crispy." Like too in-focus, too real, too stark. Colors were too bright, sounds were too loud, edges of thing were too defined. We all have a mask that we present to the world where there is a buffer of self versus your environment, and that was gone. My short term memory became horribly degraded, and I started seeing moving shadows where there were none, and certain things had "vibrations" and others did not. I can't tell you which had what, because I couldn't figure it out, and I suspected towards the end I was hallucinating, anyway. So what I am saying in all this was that's what I remember, and I am not sure if my memories are 100% accurate. I wrote stuff down, but toward the third 24 hour period, it was indecipherable afterwards.

"Okay, the trees are like lungs of the earth... how exactly? And why is the letter X written everywhere?"

So my end opinion after all those experiments was "if you don't sleep on the regular, your brain starts to malfunction, and not in a fun way."

Since that time, the longest as an adult was 46 hours, when I worked a 12 hour swing shift at a vastly understaffed International; help desk, and my second called in sick for two days. So I did my 12, she called in sick so I did her 12, and then I did my 12, and after another 10 hours my boss found someone to let me go home. I was in poor shape. I never want to do that again. The desk record was 54 hours, when a snowstorm prevented anyone from getting to or leaving the building, but that was someone else, and I believe the company set up cots for everyone trapped.

Around 48-50 hours. I didn't want to. I was in excruciating pain and couldn't take anything due to conflicting conditions. I didn't hallucinate in the way of seeing people who weren't there, but I have no idea if any memory from that stretch is real or something I imagined.

36? 38 hours? Something like that... I kind of lost track around 30.

Gaming. Ultima IV.

The hallucinations were interesting. Hard flat surfaces like table tops and counters started rippling like water.

Bit more than 72h. We were doing a practical project at uni and had a deadline on the following Tuesday. We got to work on Saturday. We made it on time, though, everything worked. 10am that day we had a presentation scheduled.

And then somebody short-circuited one of the motor control boards and it stopped working. That's when I left to go sleep for a day.

About 36h. One day, one night and the next day. Party + drugs.
I did this twice actually, but I like sleeping too much to make it a regular thing.

Not quite 5 days.

I had a bulged lumbar disc but all the pain was in my knee so I thought I had done something to my patella. I couldn't get in to see my doc so I was just trying to make my knee comfortable, which was impossible because it was an inflamed nerve. Then finally I was crawling back into bed for one more try to sleep and something about how I moved shifted the bulge and the pain went away. Maybe 30 seconds later I was hard asleep.

This was in the 90s and one of the local stations played reruns of Gilligan's Island from 2:00 am until the news started at 5:30. I watched so many episodes... but I'm fine (⊙_⊙)

Probably 36 hours, I worked alternating 12h shifts in an irregular schedule, I had worked a night shift, and before I left, my teamleader pulled me aside for a talk about my performance not being good enough.

That made it impossible to sleep and I spent my time cleaning my apartment until I got back to work in the evening again.

At the end of my second shift I took a few calls from Australia and as I am doing my best to support them I can feel myself starting to fall asleep in the middle of speaking.

I don't recommend staying awake for 36h straight.

Oh, and teamleader?

Don't have these talks when the person is between two night shifts, the bright days already make it harder to sleep!

As a teenager I stayed up for 36 hours playing warcraft3 online.

In university I once spent 48 hours finishing a project. Afterwards I remember trying to count coins to get milk. After 4 or 5 unsuccessful counts my girlfriend at the time went and got milk while I slept for nearly 20 hours.

3 or 4 days. Abuse of stimulants. Not sure my body could handle that in my late thirties.

Used to be on an odd schedule when I worked overnight.

My work shifts were Thursday to Saturday, 1800 - 0500. So Sunday, when I got off at 0500, I’d stay awake until around 1900 (being up for ~26 hours) and then to go bed. Wake up Monday morning and have a normal Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then stay up all night Wednesday night until Thursday morning (another 26 hour stint) and the go to bed Thursday morning so I could then go to work at 1800 Thursday night again.

Did that for about a year and it actually worked out reasonably well, but not something I’d entertain now that I’m older.

That schedule is also the reason all my clocks are always set for 24-hour time and I can still fall asleep in broad daylight without any trouble.

~40 hours literally a few days ago. Had a project due date through which I procrastinated heavily. Not proud of that one.

I don't think I experienced any hallucinations, but it sucked. What was weird was that by hour ~33, I tried going to sleep, but failed and ultimately got back up. Hopefully never again.

Edit: just occurred to me as well that of that time, I worked for 20 straight hours. Don't be like me.

About two days.

I woke up, went to school (around 7am). My mom and grandma were in vacation, so I was left with my dad. My "job" was to feed the cats at my grandma's place. Took a different bus so I could get to her. Fed the cats, and waited for my dad to come get me.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

He never came. I stayed up all night thinking he'd come back. My friend made a post on social media (I wanna say Xanga?), so I knew she was awake and I called and asked if her dad could come get me and drop me off at home.

Once home I brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, and was back on the bus. Came back and he was home, telling me there was a massive traffic jam that kept him locked in the road all night. He asked why I didn't just stay home.

There was no traffic jam.

3 days so that I could finish my thesis. It happened because I was a procrastinator (I still am, but not as bad).

Very often almost 3 whole days because I didn't want to (younger) or because I couldn't (2 weeks ago). Hard to remember because after like 30 hours, shit gets blurry and I don't know what was real or what was a dream.

Every once in a while I'll just skip a night's sleep, then go the bed and wake up at the normal time the following day.

I used to recover after a day or two of normal sleep, but now that I'm getting a little "older" (ie not invincibly young anymore) I'm usually wrecked for a week after pulling this stunt.

Why? Usually videogames or YouTube and "because I can". No, I'm not the healthiest individual.

5 days
Was mostly partying and doing stuff on the computer

More often I did 2-3 days, when I got hooked at something that interests me - usually something computer related

8 days.

I was in my early 20's and invincible and spent a week one summer bouncing about between clubs, house parties and outdoor raves, and taking a metric fuck ton of party drugs and psychedelics.

The week started with some really good exctasy at a nightclub (like REALLY good, the whole smoking area was basically a giant cuddle puddle in the photos), and then there was a lot of speed and drone/mkat at the various after parties.

We had rooftop 'picnics' (blankets, cushions, and drugs) watching stars and sunrises and having lots of beautiful, silly, fun moments at several different houses, and more picnics were had in the following days in gardens and one place had a pool.

There were outfit changes and showers at various points of amphetamine induced efficiency too. I lost my favourite tshirt (Cult, Love album) somewhere and we were all swapping/sharing clothes at one point for photos. (It probably found a good home where ever it ended up though and it's part of party karma for all the various clothes I lost and acquired that year)

Mid week, someone came round selling DMT and I'm pretty sure I induced some kind of REM state by smoking a piece (see below if you want to know what that was like). I did a bunch of ketamine too after it wore off, so that probably also really helped, what with the semi-lucid visuals that induces.

On the 8th day, (I was the last original survivor of the core group, most had dropped off earlier in the week and come back though) I was feeling relatively fine all things considered, but admittedly by this point I had a music and various song lyrics looping in my head near continuously and in a more intense way than I normally do.

Then I thoughtlessly took a tab of acid at a night club we were at (wrong environment completely for me to take acid), and very quickly stopped having fun.

I remember feeling the lsd in my jaw and then feeling very paradoxically sober and overwhelmed (go autism, go) as everything was now too loud and people, and flashing lights and humidity.

I borrowed a friend's keys and took the night bus back to their place as it was closest, and I remember really struggling to get the key to work in the lock of their house door. It had a pull push motion required to get the latches to flip while turning and I could not figure it out. Probably only took a few minutes but it felt like forever.

Eventually I think muscle memory kicked in and I got it. I woke up like 10 hours later as my friends were getting back from another club, for another afterparty at their house, and I went home.

That was a very fun year for me, and that week of awake is legendary, even if I do say so myself.

DMT, for anyone wondering what it's like, was absolutely fucking incredible.

You get this like little clear sheet of resin that you have to smoke in a weed pipe, covered with and on a bed of ash, so as not to burn it.

Inhale deeply, hold it in for as long as you can, and then lie flat back and close your eyes to exhale.

The visual fractals upon the exhale are intense, eyes open or closed, you are floating in the matrix with them. It's sorta like what you see when you push on your eyelids, but more fluid and sacred feeling, and your whole body feels like it is floating. It feels like this trippy visual part lasts hours too, but in reality it's less than a minute.

You also get this beautiful feeling of pure oneness with everything and safety, and this grounded inner calm that lasts for weeks afterwards.

Definetly about 3 days or so I was Nightshift in a supermarket and sometimes during heatwaves I just spent entire days trying to sleep and failing.

Apart from feeling awful I did start seeing things like thinking birds were flying over the aisle I was stocking and similar small things so not recommended really.

Hmmm, I think mine was 96 hours? I worked nights, and was taking classes during the day time. I had set the schedule so my classes directly matched the work, which was Monday night starting, and the class ended at 1600 hours on Wednesday. Some weeks I would have to work Thursday nights, some I wouldn't. I would usually grab 1 hour of sleep between work and school, and 1 hour between school and work.

That week though, I agreed to help someone out on the Sunday shift at work, and the Thursday day rotation at the hospital, and I just couldn't get any sleep. So Sunday starting at 1800 hours, up until Thurday ~1700 hours. I drove home, and thanks to an agreement with my boss, I didn't have to come into work until 2200 hours, so I crashed. Lo and behold, I woke up to a cop in my bedroom, because it was 0200 hours and I was late for work. My boss didn't know exactly what I was doing, so they had no way to know that it was for lack of sleep. I hadn't been late to work ever and only called in sick once during the 10 years I'd been working there. They panicked, thinking I was dead, and sent that damn cop, lol. Oh well, boss agreed I didn't have to come into work and I wasn't complaining.

Like another poster said, things just got weird as the sleep deprivation kicked in. Shadows sometimes wouldn't line up with where they were attached, background objects would fade in and out of focus while looking at someone in front of me, and my recollection of what had happened five minutes ago blended with what had happened five days ago. What was reality and what was just in my head couldn't be distinguished. Then, sitting on top of all of that, is just this weird ache where you're craving sleep but you're doing things like standing up or walking around to prevent any random lean from turning into a collapse as you nod off.

Anyway, two weeks later I hit a pothole on the side of the highway as I drove home, because I was drifting off the road with the lack of sleep. The pothole broke my oil pan in half, and I quickly realized how stupid I was being. I took time off in the middle of the stretch of classes/work, so I only ever was up for 36 hours at a time for the month after that.

3 days for a game jam where we were attempting to make a game in a weekend

Aproximately 80 hours, because of a power drink.

Whatever it was in the mix, it kept me going for the better part of three days and three nights, plus a few extra hours.

I went to work, went to night school and played Fallout, with no signs of fatigue. When it finally wore off, whatever it was fuelling me, I slept for 36 hours straight, woke up, showered and emptied the fridge, the pantry and everything else there was to eat available in the cupboards.

That was a crazy event.

A couple of months ago I didn't sleep all weekend. Got up Friday and didn't go to bed until about 10:00 p.m. the following Monday.

No drugs, no caffeine just didn't feel like sleeping. It was kind of refreshing.

I was in labor for 40 hours, so probably that. Then at the end of it I had a baby that didn’t sleep either.

40 hours. Mix between working to pay for college and overdue assignments. Then drive 2 hours to Thanksgiving and had Thanksgiving lunch. Then went into a food coma for 14 hours straight

38 hours, I was working on a creative project I was passionate about with a hard deadline. I worked on it basically non-stop the entire time, I don't remember much of it though. I do remember that after about 30 hours I started seeing patterns on things, like the walls and ceiling were covered in shifting sliding wallpaper.

My sophomore year of high school I snuck out of the house one night, my friends and I pushed the car down the driveway and got it going. Hung out all night. Got caught about 5AM by the local police. (I didn’t have a license either, I was 15 I think.) Cop drove me home and dropped me off to my mom. By then I had been awake 22 hours and was exhausted and tried to go to bed. Oh no. My punishment was going to school. So about 4PM when I got home…. 34 hours awake? (I was a pretty good kid in school…. Most of the time..) 😁

About 36 hours in Marine Corps Boot camp. I'm not sure how long everyone else stayed awake because at about 24 hours I failed the medical exam and was separated for discharge.

Nearly 80 hours. This was around 12 years ago, I had a full time job and was on a volunteer fire department. I would get off work and immediately get toned out for a fire or back to back medical calls until my shift the next day. It took copious amounts of caffeine to keep going, and eventually I just crashed out from exhaustion. 0/10 don't recommend.

72 hours, uni final exams

Dreamhack… I spent around 60 hours awake before I crashed

24 hours is sadly quite common for me. Max might have been just past 45 hours. I don't think I ever reached 48.

56 hours was my longest stint. Was in late high school and just had back to back to back events non-stop including a 24h film festival planning production and submission after a day of classes followed by a big blowout senior party by which point it was just a challenge to see how far to take it. Was a pretty fun roller coaster all told. Plenty of 30-36 hour days since then too, but it’s getting more difficult to go past 24h as I age.

About 4 days. I went on a "how high can I get from insomnia" binge with my friend when we quit drugs (yes, I'm aware of the irony).

We were both people who got into drugs really early (12 for me) and were voluntarily sober by 15-16. So we needed something to do while all our friends were dropping acid (and both already had insomnia).

Do NOT recommend. It's the second closest I've ever come to losing my mind

Probably like 3 days because my high school insisted on overworking students for the black excellence and just about everyone in my life glorified sleep deprivation, starving, overwork, and abusing people into doing better because mental health is For White People. Today I'm still fighting burnout I've had since 2019, and suffering from falling down train station stairs on the third day of having no sleep. I really just wish I was born white or dead.

Ohhh, story time from 30ish years ago.

It is summer in the late 90s, living downtown with nothing to do. 4 of us decided to stay awake as long as possible, with the help of LSD and PCP and my locally famous "acid walks". We did an escalating amount of LSD(forget the actual amount started at 2 each then more each following dose) 2 quit after 48 hours, they just dropped asleep to the floor. Myself and a woman friend did another 48 on top of that and added some PCP to the mix. It was a very, umm, interesting and confusing 4 days, I don't know how lucid I was at the end. Don't really remember much more now. plz do not do this I slept the 5th day completely. Don't abuse the power of youth, harness it.

Unrelated, another friend of mine from that era took enough valium at a party that he slept for 4 days straight, best part was when he did finally wake up he asked the host what happened to the party. She was laughing when she told me, as did he.

5 days in 1994, and for no particular reason, just for funsies. Now I get cranky if I get denied my sleep schedule for more than 4 hours.

About 42 hours. I start getting hallucinatory sparkles at roughly 40 hours and usually go to bed then.

Only done it a few times in my life, but the most memorable one was while in the middle of a 5-day LARP. We were going hard, I was NPCing, and I started seeing shadows in the middle of a fight. I took that as my cue to dip out and crash.

40ish hours. I was in my 20s, a phd student, with time on a one-of-a-kind scientific instrument. Got a lot of data.

About 70 hours, at that time in my life it was normal for me to go 24 hours or so without sleep because I was addicted to WoW.

That time I realised I'd hit 30 and decided to see how long I could go without sleep.

At somewhere after 60 hours I began hallucinating and became convinced that there were elephants inside the walls making them deform.
That was the sign I needed to go to sleep, and I slept for almost 20 hours straight.

67 hours. After a full day of work, my wife and I hopped an international flight to Europe. There were two layovers, including a 6-hour one in Dubai. I tried to sleep on the longest leg of the flight, but with my restless wife on one side and a restless stranger on the other, I couldn't. Once we landed and reached our AirBnB, I announced I was going to take a desperately needed nap. My wife stood at the bedside staring at me until I gave up and we went for a walk to see Prague.

Dreamed of seeing that city for half my life, but it was a couple of days before I was capable of enjoying it.

I used to stay up all night when having fun on occasion. The longest was two nights and then I went to bed at around 8pm on the third day. It's been awhile since I lived that life but I used to wake up feeling great and generally be in a great mood, and it helped me reset my sleep cycle so my insomnia would get less disruptive for awhile afterwards. That said, not sleeping is bad for you. If you're doing it regularly you will have negative health effects, and if you stay up for more than a day you will start hallucinating and probably make bad decisions.

I'm not entirely sure, but it took place over a week long military exercise. We setup SHORAD missile defenses at night too act as OPFOR for the Air Force, and then moved positions during the day. It was my first long distance extended training mission as an NCO so I was making sure I did everything I was instructed to do. Stay in constant radio contact, scan the skies, id targets, shoot move and communicate. My gunner started hallucinating by the 3rd or maybe 4th day. I don't have any memories of sleeping that entire week, but I assume I must have been dozing off constantly. We rarely saw anyone else that week and just spent the days wandering the desert alone in some sort hazy dreamlike state. I should have made sure we slept more. It was a good lesson..."Hey Srgt., did you just see a Puerto Rican woman with a red balloon? Wait, did you just say yes!?"