Can people die due to insomnia?

We've all suffered from a poor night's sleep. According to the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, vast numbers of Americans (30-40 percent) report suffering from one or more nights of insomnia during any given year. But can insomnia get so bad that you actually die from it? There's very little research on what happens to the human body when it goes for extended periods without sleep—after all, no lab in the country would sign off on such experiments. From what we do know, it's highly likely that one's body would eventually just shut down. But what's more common, and troubling, is chronic insomnia, bouts of brief, fitful sleep—an hour here, three hours there—lasting beyond three weeks into months or years at a time. About 10-15 percent of Americans suffer from chronic insomnia, and while this type of condition is not deadly in and of itself, it can lead to a whole host of other disturbing mental and physical effects.

 

The ill effects of insomnia can be immediate after just one sleepless night. (Even not getting enough sleep per night can be dangerous: studies show that mortality rates spike in those that sleep drastically less than seven hours a night.) According to recent research by Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, the amygdala—the part of the brain that alerts the body to be prepared in times of danger—goes haywire when a full night's sleeplessness occurs. That in turn wreaks havoc on the prefrontal cortex, which controls our logical reasoning and "fight or flight" reflex, turning us, as Walker says, into "emotional Jell-O." Memory capacity and speech control diminish; irritability spikes. At the same time, some studies have shown that cortisol, a hormone related to stress and depression and linked to cardiovascular disease, is building up in the body instead of being moderated by a good night's rest. Concentration is kaput. The muscles ache. What's worse, the external, ordinary dangers of modern life become many times more deadly: according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there are about 200,000 car accidents a year caused by sleepy drivers, killing more people than drunk driving. Essentially robbed of its power to encode or consolidate memories after just one day, the brain quickly instead begins to mimic the profile of people with acute psychiatric disorders.

Physiologically, the human body could survive without sleep for 11 to 18 days, based on research from experiments and various other stunt-based records. Taken to extremes, the results of sleeplessness get downright grim, which is why it's been both shunned as a form of unethical research and used as torture. When lawyers for former President George W. Bush argued, in a 2005 memo, that keeping detainees awake for 180 hours—seven and a half days—didn't constitute torture, the medical researchers cited in support howled with protest, calling it "deplorable" and "nonsense." "Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body's defense mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses," responded Professor James Horne of the Sleep Research Centre at England's Loughborough University and author of Why We Sleep. Horne says the effects of prolonged sleeplessness are painful indeed. Various brain and several bodily functions go completely gunnysack. Vision goes blurry or double; nausea sets in. By a week, hypertension and body temperature run amok; the brain may be overcome with hyperemotionality, paranoia, and hallucinations.

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