An Australian teenager who claims to have broken the world record for staying awake has spoken out about the symptoms he felt and how long it took to recover.
‘Norme’, 19, says he stayed awake for 265 hours straight to break the record set by Randy Gardner, who spent 264 hours and 25 minutes awake as a teenager in 1964.
He spent 11 days and one hour awake in his home near Melbourne, as an audience of viewers watched online – or at least they did until YouTube banned him for “violating community guidelines”, as did streaming service Twitch.
On day 10, Norme, who did not speak to any doctor before accepting the challenge, said: 9News He was ‘quite delirious’.
As she neared her goal, she posted a photo of her X-shaped hands, saying the skin on them had become irritated and was peeling.
Norme admitted that he fell into a microsleep at some points during his stunt, but had friends who helped him wake up when that happened.
At one point during the 11 days Norme was awake, police called his home, alerted by someone concerned about his health.
He was advised to speak to a doctor, but this failed to persuade him to break his record attempt and go to sleep.
An Australian teenager who claims to have broken the world record for staying awake has spoken out about the symptoms he suffered and how long it took to recover.
When he passed the 265-hour mark, he slept for 38 hours, he said, and felt dizzy when he finally woke up.
However, his risky behaviour did not impress professionals, with sleep expert Dr Vanessa Cropley saying she was “astonished that anyone would be willing to voluntarily undergo such an ordeal”.
‘It’s certainly not advisable from a health perspective,’ said the Melbourne University academic.
“There are a lot of risks involved in this, so it’s quite worrying that someone would do this just as an experiment.”
However, Norme was unrepentant, saying: “I looked it up and the mortality rate is zero percent. No one has ever died from trying it.”
This is where he is wrong. Every day people around the world die from lack of sleep when, for example, they crash their cars due to exhaustion.
Often, those exhausted people also kill other people: passengers, people in other vehicles, and pedestrians.
Staying awake on purpose is so dangerous that there is no official record of it (the Guinness Book of World Records stopped counting it in the late 1990s due to its very serious and possibly fatal consequences).
The long-term effects of sleep deprivation include sluggishness, irritability, and loss of concentration.
“What’s more worrying is that sometimes symptoms of some form of psychosis can occur,” Dr Cropley said.
‘There have been cases where people see things that aren’t there, or hear things that aren’t there, or have this kind of paranoid thinking.’
Studies have long shown that chronic lack of sleep can increase the risk of a range of diseases, including obesity, memory loss, diabetes, heart disease and a reduced immune response, leaving people vulnerable to infections.
After just 18 hours without sleep, a person’s blood pressure begins to rise, forcing the heart to work harder and placing additional strain on it.
Going 18 hours without sleep also causes a drop in testosterone levels (the male sex hormone).
As she neared her goal, she posted a photo of her X-shaped hands (pictured), saying the skin on them had become irritated and was peeling.
When he passed the 265-hour mark he slept for 38 hours, he said, and felt dizzy when he finally woke up.
Lack of sleep can lead to obesity, memory loss, diabetes, heart disease, intense and unstable emotions, impaired learning ability, and a reduced immune response, leaving you vulnerable to disease.
Randy Gardner, the American teenager whose 60-year-old record Norme was attempting to break, initially showed no ill effects from his 11-day vigil but later reported suffering years of excruciating insomnia.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Norme for comment.