Sleep deprivation: how dangerous it is

Deprivation of sleep is a total or partial failure of sleep, in other words, insomnia. The use of this concept for medicinal purposes causes a lot of controversy regarding its usefulness or harm. Our task is to help you understand its essence, and not give it an assessment.

Naturally, a person can not help but sleep constantly, but in his power to limit this process to a minimum (several hours a day). Deprivation of sleep has several main stages:

1. The main thing is not to sleep! This is the initial stage, which lasts from one to six days. During this period, a person will constantly struggle with sleep. The main task - to dive into sleep only for 2 hours, and not for the whole night or day. It is important here - do not break, keep a psychological calm. To do this, you need to diversify your activities in a waking state, engage in something new and interesting. And the case that you choose should not be monotonous (watching television programs or clicking seeds), but active. Remember that during this period you can experience nervous tension, frustration, you may feel bad. However, after experiencing this stage, you will feel that such a state will pass by itself.
2. The second stage of sleep deprivation is shock therapy. It can last up to 10 days. This period is characterized by impaired consciousness: people will seem to you robots, the perception of the surrounding reality can be violated. Sometimes memory will fail: a person will forget what happened a moment ago, the confusion of past and present will begin (you can not distinguish between these two concepts for some time). An easy degree of euphoria is possible.
3. This stage is fraught with constant insomnia, but the adaptation of the organism to deprivation is already coming. All body systems become aggravated, processes are accelerated (clear perception of the surrounding world, exacerbation of feelings and a sense of euphoria). However, if insomnia does not pass, the next stage comes, which is mortally dangerous for life.
4. Hallucinations. At this stage, there may be visual hallucinations. Sleep deprivation should not begin at this stage, because it can end with paranoia or with a psychiatric hospital.

To date , doctors use this technique to get a person out of deep depression. However, the essence of the method used in this case is that the cyclicity of sleep is gradually changing, the number of hours of sleep is decreasing, and the period of wakefulness increases. Doctors believe that deprivation of sleep selectively affects some of the brain areas. In this case, those areas that are not associated with a depressed state, do not undergo any impact. This justifies a small number of side effects.

Deprivation of sleep, the consequences of which can be very serious for the human psyche, should only be carried out under the supervision of doctors. The fact is that a long sleep deprivation can cause an epileptic attack, even if a person has never had this illness.

Many participants in the experiments on long-term sleep failure spoke positively about the operation of this technique: at some point the working capacity of the organism increases, vivid hallucinations appear, and euphoria begins, which is characterized by an increase in the acuteness of the perception of the world. However, it is important to get out of this state in time, because sleep deprivation can develop into a psychosis, the treatment of which can be prolonged for a long time.

Many great personalities, through the use of this technique, increased their creative potential, which, in many ways, helped to increase scientific discoveries of the world scale and create great works of art. And this, you must agree, is worth a lot.