So for those of you who have never dealt with it, sleep deprivation sucks.
I'm not just talking about the once-in-a-while case of staying up all night or even for a day or two straight, where you'll start to lose focus on what you're doing, your reaction times start to slow, and you can't ever really think of the words you want to say. That's not fun, either, but it's cake in comparison.
I'm talking about a situation in which you haven't slept more than maybe four hours in as many days. See, when you pull an all-nighter, you eventually hit your second wind. Usually this comes at about the 24-hour mark, from my experience. You feel more awake, more focused. It isn't like you've gotten a full night's sleep, but you definitely feel better than you have the last couple of hours, and you can usually comfortably stay up for another six to ten.
But at a certain point, your body runs out of second winds. In my experience, that's usually around the three day mark. You're tired constantly, you have trouble focusing on even the most mundane things, and you can't form a well-said sentence to save your life. That last part, I can usually get around in text, but vocally I sometimes even lose my train of thought in the middle of a sentence. You get distracted very easily, and generally your coordination starts to go to shit.
Did you know that sleep deprivation can make you hallucinate, though? Most people never get to that point. They stay up all night, either working on a paper they put off till the last minute or trying to finish that last season of Breaking Bad on Netflix, and then they go to bed sometime the next morning or, at the latest, when they'd normally go to bed the next night. Most people only stay up a night or two, so most people never get to the point where the floor shifts and seems to spread out whenever they look at it, about four days in. Sometimes, you see things move out of the corner of your eye in a completely empty room. It's not just visual, either. I've sworn I've smelt someone cooking in my kitchen at times, even though I leave alone. What's worst, though, are the physical hallucinations: It might feel like bugs are crawling across your legs, or (and this is one of the worst things I've ever experienced) it might feel like something is in your head, scratching at the backs of your eyes.
It's either day four or day five, I'm not quite sure, but everything is just gonna go downhill from here.
Also, the stick bugs are back. Joy.
Not everything is in your mind.
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