On average we spend about a third of our life sleeping. That’s eight hours, every single day without fail where you are for all intents and purposes dead to the world. The average worldwide life expectancy is about 71 years. That means if you sleep 8 hours on each of those 25,915 days you’re alive you will have slept a staggering 207,320 hours in your lifetime! But what if you didn’t need to sleep and all of sudden had an extra couple hundred thousand hours? What could you do with all that extra time?
First of all, this is a purely hypothetical show because if you’ve seen our other shows on the matter of sleep you’ll know that we just can’t go without it for extended periods of time. The longest anyone has ever stayed awake is 11 days or 264 hours. We don’t know how long a person could last without dying because no one can stay awake that long. But you all know that just going one or two nights without sleep can make you a little crazy. Try three consecutive days and you might just start seeing things and hearing things, and that could turn into full-blown psychosis. We don’t suggest you try it.
So you couldn’t just stay awake forever, but let’s just pretend today that this is possible. You are not going to feel drowsy, or irritable, and you are not going to start conversing with your favorite cartoon characters over a glass of milk that doesn’t exist. Let’s imagine you just don’t need to sleep at all and feel completely fine.
According to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder if we just lie awake in bed all night we burn about 135 more calories than if we sleep. That’s not moving around, but just staying awake in bed. We guess you’ve all had a terrible night like that before when dealing with stress. In your sleepless life, you are not going to spend the entire night just lying down, so the first change in this new life of yours is that you might want to eat a bit more.
There would be at least one extra meal during the 24-hour day. You won’t actually be breaking a fast, so we suppose we’d have to stop calling that first meal breakfast. Instead, you’ll have a morning meal, a midday meal, an evening meal, and a night meal. We guess you’ll be eating around 2 am and then again around 7am. You’ll need plenty of food in the house because not many places are open at 2am- though we suppose if people didn’t sleep anymore then business hours would certainly change.
This will have consequences on your grocery bill. It’s hard to say how much more money you will need. If you look at statistics it’s said the average American household will have a food budget of about $280 to $500 a month. The number changed significantly depending on the city. A recent report in the UK said an average family will spend about 60 pounds ($77) on food a week.
Again, the cost of groceries in the UK will change dramatically from household to household. There are beans on toast washed down with a three-liter bottle of “tried & trusted” Frosty Jack’s cider people, and there are those who turn their noses up at Tesco. We know that some people might spend $100 on one meal, especially if that’s washed down with fine wine. You know your own lifestyle, but anyone who doesn’t sleep is going to have to figure out a new budget with that extra meal in the day. Talking about fine wine, you’ll never be able to sleep off a hangover again so getting drunk might be hard work.
You are also going to factor in that other bills that will be different, such as the electricity you use. This bill will be bigger. Do you watch a lot of tvs or play games that ask you to buy in-game items? Not sleeping is going to cost you, so it’s a good job you now have extra time to work. But what can you do all night since most jobs are daytime jobs? Well, you could work a night shift, but let’s face it, working a day shift and a night shift will be exhausting even if you don’t feel the need to sleep.
We suggest you just add a couple of hours to your normal job and do something online to earn money. You may have seen in our show about online jobs that there’s a lot you can do from your computer. Some of you might have day jobs that pay really well and we guess you lucky guys won’t need the extra work. The question is, though, will you get bored? Maybe you could educate yourself and start reading more. The statistics differ depending on where you look, and you can find studies that tell you one in four Americans didn’t read a single book in a year.
But you can find other studies, such as one conducted by Pew Research that said at least in 2012 74 percent of Americans read at least one book in that year. We should say ‘consumed’ a book is a better verb since more Americans are now doing the audio book thing. Pew Research seems to think the average American will read about 12 books a year, so we think if you are not sleeping all night and not working we can double that. No sleep more knowledge more informed people better society…we think. Let’s just be what will happen, and we’ll throw all the negatives at you later.
You might also get a hobby or follow a creative pursuit. You always said you wanted to write a book and now you have the time. J K Rowling spent six years on “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone”, but then she had a kid and a job. We might also add that some folks write fast. It only took Anthony Burgess three weeks to write the cult classic “A Clockwork Orange.” However fast you write doesn’t really matter, because with 8 more hours in the day you are going to be able to knock at least one book out in a year.
Or perhaps you want to create a YouTube channel. There are a bazillion guides out there that will tell you how to do this, but we should say that whatever they tell you it will take a lot of time and effort and of course you’ll need a good idea. For most channels it will be a few years before a decent audience is built up, but if you are familiar with such creative pursuits you’ll know the problem for most people is how to build a channel and still hold down a day job. You are in luck because you now don’t have that problem.
With eight extra hours in the day it is likely you are going to find some success. You might also get lonely if you are the only person who is not sleeping. Just imagine spending a third of your life alone. Well, maybe you have online friends in other countries, but it’s not the same as spending time with someone. Still, it’s likely if you're an American non-sleeper you are going to make a lot of new friends on the other side of the world. Oliver meets Reyansh, Reyansh, this is Oliver, your new buddy who is sleepless in Seattle. If you have a partner perhaps there are going to be many hours you are just waiting for them to wake.
The fact is, if you do not sleep again we think you really are going to have to start being hardworking or creative. If you don’t you are likely going to overthink things and get bored and stressed. Not sleeping might be harder than you think if you don’t know how to fill the time. Don’t let sleeplessness be a prison. Another thing is taking care of your body. Your muscles repair themselves when you sleep, so we suggest you don’t overdo it when you are awake. We suggest you do exercise such as yoga, and generally, just try and stay healthy.
There will be other negative things that will happen. Let’s say someone asks you to do something and you don’t do it. You feel lazy, but they will say something like, “C’mon, you have 24 hours a day, unlike us poor folks.” Not sleeping means you are basically on the clock all the time. You wouldn’t even be able to say you didn’t pick up the phone because you were sleeping. You might even get exploited by your boss who now demands more work. There will be no excuse for not seeing a message on Facebook Messenger. What if you and your partner didn’t sleep? We might think this would be great because you could spend more time together, but one expert talking to Live Science said couples need their downtime. Being awake with one another all the time he said would put stress on the relationship. He said you’d either argue more or just get really bored of each other. Maybe a sleepless life would turn into single life. You’d have to update your Tinder profile to say, “I don’t sleep.” You might be richer, but unhappier.
If you were a whole family of non-sleepers we can imagine a total nightmare. It’s this thing called sleep that can give us a break from others. Sleep can settle arguments; it irons out disputes. Imagine 24 hours with your brother, mother, father, and children. Do you think you could cope with that? While we have talked about a lot of positive things such as being creative or productive, we imagine not sleeping will become a kind of living nightmare for many people. Even if in our hypothetical situation your mental faculties were ok, we think your emotional well-being would suffer.
Your world might become something like the play “No Exit” written by French philosopher lean-Paul Satre. In that play, people go to hell, but hell is just being locked in a room with certain folks for eternity. Things don’t go too well, and the famous quote from that play is “Hell is other people.” If you never slept again we think you might agree. Even the Walton family couldn’t survive not sleeping. In the non-sleeping version of that show, John-Boy ends up doing a hard time trying to strangle Grandpa Walton for talking badly about his cow. They just needed some distance.
Scientists have actually talked about what might happen if we “cured” sleep. Today we have used a hypothetical and said we wouldn’t be too affected mentally by this lack of sleep, but in real life even if we took just 4 hours from our eight hours scientists don’t think it would make us more productive or creative. Live Science interviewed experts about this and they seemed to think we need our eight hours, or thereabouts.
One scientist said, “It's really seductive to think we would all become smarter and more productive, but that's not necessarily the case.” So, in conclusion, not sleeping would have some initial benefits if indeed the scenario played out so that your brain and body could take it; if we cured sleep, so to speak. But the emotional stress of having to cope with other people 24-7 would in the end destroy your relationships; well, it would destroy most people’s relationships. You might have more money in the bank and you might write the next great American novel, but hell other people would become your reality.
Productivity in the bedroom might go up only because there are a lot of downtimes, and we know more babies are made in the winter months. But in the end, having those babies around you all the time would create a perfect storm and we think you’d soon start to resent even the most cherished people in your life. We don’t just need sleep to rest our brains and fix our bodies, but we need that break in the land of Nod just to get away from people.
We went online and tried to find if there are or were any people that just never slept. We found one case of a Vietnemese man who claimed he didn’t sleep for 46 years. Yes, you heard that right. We should say that some people might doubt whether this is true, but it seems his case was investigated in Vietnam and he had his believers. He once said, “I feel like a plant without water.” So, if you never slept, that’s how you might feel.
We also found a man called Al Herpin, and he got the epithet, “The man who never slept.” The New York Times said this about him in 1903: “Albert Herpin, born in France in 1862 and for fifteen years a hostler in the employ of Freeholder Walter Phares of this city, declares that he has not slept a wink during the past ten years. Notwithstanding this, he is in perfect health, and does not seem to suffer any discomfort from his remarkable condition.”
Later his obituary appeared in the New York Times and this is what it said: “Alfred E. Herpin, a recluse who lived on the outskirts of the city and insisted that he never slept. He was 94 years old and, when questioned concerning his claim of ‘sleepless’, maintained that he never actually dozed but merely ‘rested’.
No other person with total insomnia has lived for such a long period of time. It was likely that he died for other reasons, not sleep deprivation, as his insomnia did not seem to have any effect on his health.” Medical professionals will tell you that no man can just not sleep, but it seems Al was believed by many.
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