In 1963, teenager Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours, setting the only verified sleep deprivation record. By day 11, he couldn’t do simple math, saw street signs as people, and spoke in slurred monotone. After the experiment, he slept for 14 hours straight.
by Royal-Hippo-2104
33 Comments
Sometimes i sleep 14 hours straight after one long day of work….
The only similarity between me and him is we both Sleep 14 hours straight !
14 hours is surprisingly little, I’ve done that after a heavy weekend
Can’t imagine how many tweakers have broken this record since
Slept for 18 on deployment once…skipped a whole calendar day and woke up confused as all get out lol
Edit:
We crossed multiple time zones in those 18 hours
I can raw dog 14 hours of sleep even on a normal day. Fucking immature
That’s weird, I’ve stayed up for roughly 24 hours straight and I slept for 16 hours afterward. I feel like you’d have way more sleep debt.
Worked over 96 hrs with a few quick meal breaks on a crab fishing boat. We’d consistently work 48 hrs at a time and we would all sleep over 25 hrs straight whenever we headed in to offload.
I can sleep 14 hours anyway. Though I wonder how long it took him to fully recover. I can’t imagine that after that long that 14 hours was enough to get him back to baseline.
I sleep 14 hours after walking for an hour.
What’s interesting is that the researchers did not encourage him to do this. He basically said “I’m doing this, you can take notes if you want.”
14 hrs? One time I took “Non Drowsy” Claritin and slept 18 hrs straight. My record is almost 20 hrs when I was in college (I was supper stressed out and depressed).
I was up 5+ days a few times and holy moly those are some crazy hearing and visual hallucinations
I used to regularly sleep 18-20 hours straight after raving back in the 00s.
Go out Friday night, come home early Sunday morning, go to bed late morning, sleep right through until Monday morning, get up and go to work.
Christ even these days, I can go to sleep after a Friday night out and sleep until mid afternoon on a Saturday.
After that I would have slept 264 days
sometimes i wonder if the regular modern day takes more mental energy
14 hour? I could do that in my sleep
Due to the Navy, I was up for 3 straight days. I do not remember anything from after Hour 26. When I finally went to bed, i slept for 20 hours. Work up like normal
What parent allowed a 17 year old (as per google) to participate in what frankly could have been dangerous experiment 😳
When Guinness World Records stopped accepting submissions for this in 1996, the standing record was held by Robert McDonald at 453 hrs 43 min. [NPR Source](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/28/1227217274/sleep-deprivation-record) Although not everyone experiences permanent side effects, it’s still considered extremely dangerous and the full impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on neurological health is still unknown.
Everyone commenting on him only sleeping for 14 hours, and not the fact he was awake for 11 days.
“On his final day, Gardner presided over a press conference where he appeared to be in good health. “I wanted to prove that bad things didn’t happen if you went without sleep,” said Gardner. “I thought, ‘I can break that record and I don’t think it would be a negative”
My record is a little over 5 days. I quit methadone cold turkey. I had crazy visual and auditory hallucinations after the first 48 hours. I finally took 2 Xanax bars just to get 6 hours of sleep. I’m close to 10 years sober now.
As someone who was once awake for five days straight I slept for almost twenty hours afterwards. Fourteen is kind of wild.
Shit… I can sleep for 14 hours straight every day of the week.
I slept for 14 straight hours this weekend.
I’ve slept 21 hours straight once because I couldn’t be bothered to wake up
I’ve done 72+ hours on deployment. I was completely non effective at that point. Coherent, but had hallucinations, irritability, and zoning out.
Do not recommend.
It’s the only verified, because Guinness refuse to accept more attempts. It’s extremely dangerous.
Theres no way this guy wasn’t micro sleeping I have been up multiple days and micro sleeping is inevitable past a certain point
By hour 24, I too cannot do simple math. I shudder think what damage he did to his brain. Probably caused several parts to shrivel up.
I slept 14 hours last night after 14 beers
I was awake for 136 hours once because of anxiety. Monday morning until Saturday night. Slept for nine hours after I went to the hospital on day six. Don’t remember most the time I was awake, but afterwards it took me months to be able to sleep regularly and I had to deal with a newly developed stutter. I still have trauma responses related to sleep because of it.
I don’t recommend it.
14 hours, that’s cute