Probably 36 hours, I worked alternating 12h shifts in an irregular schedule, I had worked a night shift, and before I left, my teamleader pulled me aside for a talk about my performance not being good enough.

That made it impossible to sleep and I spent my time cleaning my apartment until I got back to work in the evening again.

At the end of my second shift I took a few calls from Australia and as I am doing my best to support them I can feel myself starting to fall asleep in the middle of speaking.

I don’t recommend staying awake for 36h straight.

Oh, and teamleader?

Don’t have these talks when the person is between two night shifts, the bright days already make it harder to sleep!

Every once in a while I’ll just skip a night’s sleep, then go the bed and wake up at the normal time the following day.

I used to recover after a day or two of normal sleep, but now that I’m getting a little “older” (ie not invincibly young anymore) I’m usually wrecked for a week after pulling this stunt.

Why? Usually videogames or YouTube and “because I can”. No, I’m not the healthiest individual.

When I was a student I wrote a piece of software. Originally an assignment to be done within 6 months, I decided to go for it at once. I started programming on Thursday, and finished it on Saturday, while living on snacks, pizza, soft drinks, and tea. No time for sleep while being 100% in the zone.

After a night long drug binge, I stayed awake for five days. It was interspersed with small naps, and by the third day I was getting some healthy sleep again (perhaps 30mn or so at a time), but it never felt long enough. I was only back to a normal sleep schedule on the fifth night. It was terrible. I phoned a friend at some point to help me because I was in shambles and absolutely panicked I would never settle again. Don’t do cathinones

Bit more than 72h. We were doing a practical project at uni and had a deadline on the following Tuesday. We got to work on Saturday. We made it on time, though, everything worked. 10am that day we had a presentation scheduled.

And then somebody short-circuited one of the motor control boards and it stopped working. That’s when I left to go sleep for a day.

I did a little over 4 days when I was a teenager just to see how long I could go. Really kinda sucked after the first 2 days. But I was just playing video games.

I did many 2-3 day stints in the Army. That sucked way, way more because yeah, I was definitely not playing video games.

Not quite 5 days.

I had a bulged lumbar disc but all the pain was in my knee so I thought I had done something to my patella. I couldn’t get in to see my doc so I was just trying to make my knee comfortable, which was impossible because it was an inflamed nerve. Then finally I was crawling back into bed for one more try to sleep and something about how I moved shifted the bulge and the pain went away. Maybe 30 seconds later I was hard asleep.

This was in the 90s and one of the local stations played reruns of Gilligan’s Island from 2:00 am until the news started at 5:30. I watched so many episodes… but I’m fine (⊙_⊙)

Hmmm, I think mine was 96 hours? I worked nights, and was taking classes during the day time. I had set the schedule so my classes directly matched the work, which was Monday night starting, and the class ended at 1600 hours on Wednesday. Some weeks I would have to work Thursday nights, some I wouldn’t. I would usually grab 1 hour of sleep between work and school, and 1 hour between school and work.

That week though, I agreed to help someone out on the Sunday shift at work, and the Thursday day rotation at the hospital, and I just couldn’t get any sleep. So Sunday starting at 1800 hours, up until Thurday ~1700 hours. I drove home, and thanks to an agreement with my boss, I didn’t have to come into work until 2200 hours, so I crashed. Lo and behold, I woke up to a cop in my bedroom, because it was 0200 hours and I was late for work. My boss didn’t know exactly what I was doing, so they had no way to know that it was for lack of sleep. I hadn’t been late to work ever and only called in sick once during the 10 years I’d been working there. They panicked, thinking I was dead, and sent that damn cop, lol. Oh well, boss agreed I didn’t have to come into work and I wasn’t complaining.

Like another poster said, things just got weird as the sleep deprivation kicked in. Shadows sometimes wouldn’t line up with where they were attached, background objects would fade in and out of focus while looking at someone in front of me, and my recollection of what had happened five minutes ago blended with what had happened five days ago. What was reality and what was just in my head couldn’t be distinguished. Then, sitting on top of all of that, is just this weird ache where you’re craving sleep but you’re doing things like standing up or walking around to prevent any random lean from turning into a collapse as you nod off.

Anyway, two weeks later I hit a pothole on the side of the highway as I drove home, because I was drifting off the road with the lack of sleep. The pothole broke my oil pan in half, and I quickly realized how stupid I was being. I took time off in the middle of the stretch of classes/work, so I only ever was up for 36 hours at a time for the month after that.

3 days for a game jam where we were attempting to make a game in a weekend

Probably like 3 days because my high school insisted on overworking students for the black excellence and just about everyone in my life glorified sleep deprivation, starving, overwork, and abusing people into doing better because mental health is For White People. Today I’m still fighting burnout I’ve had since 2019, and suffering from falling down train station stairs on the third day of having no sleep. I really just wish I was born white or dead.

About 36 hours in Marine Corps Boot camp. I’m not sure how long everyone else stayed awake because at about 24 hours I failed the medical exam and was separated for discharge.

About 70 hours, at that time in my life it was normal for me to go 24 hours or so without sleep because I was addicted to WoW.

That time I realised I’d hit 30 and decided to see how long I could go without sleep.

At somewhere after 60 hours I began hallucinating and became convinced that there were elephants inside the walls making them deform.
That was the sign I needed to go to sleep, and I slept for almost 20 hours straight.

Around 48-50 hours. I didn’t want to. I was in excruciating pain and couldn’t take anything due to conflicting conditions. I didn’t hallucinate in the way of seeing people who weren’t there, but I have no idea if any memory from that stretch is real or something I imagined.

1994, I was… A manager for Radio Shack. No, I didn’t wear bad pants.

My District Manager (DM) promoted me to a larger store from my current store. The other manager was being demoted… To MY store. Which made the whole thing a bit awkward. The other manager and I also were not getting any more help. We literally were going to do the takeover inventories ourselves… both stores.

I got up Saturday morning at 7:30 and got into my store at 8:30am and worked till 6pm, when my store closed. One of my employees said he’d help with my store’s inventory, but he couldn’t work past 10pm. We entered final counts and started reconcile at 4am. Reconcile is typically left to the manager taking over, but I didn’t trust the guy, so we both did the reconcile (comparing what we counted in the store vs what the computer said was in the store and explaining any variances). That was done about 6am, largely because he wanted to dispute items that were at the repair center that I had documented. We then moved to his former, my new store. Which had a much larger inventory. We stopped and picked up breakfast and started counts around 7:30. By this time I had been awake and working for 24 hours.

Inventory of my new store was a fucking nightmare. Counts were WAY off from computer’s inventory. Entire computer systems were missing, monitors, a couple of hi-fi receivers. Don’t even get me started on force feed. At about noon, I called our DM and said I needed either him, or a senior manager onsite to cover this inventory and some helpers. My DM’s lazy ass wasn’t about to work on a Sunday, so he sent a senior manager and two employees. The senior manager, someone that I knew and trusted, did reconcile as we finished counts. Boy was the inventory completely screwed. That was just the large items, by 10pm we hadn’t even gotten into the force feed items (items hanging on pegs). We finally got counts done at 6am and I signed off on the reconcile around 7:30. The store opened at 9am, but I lived 25 minutes away, so I just freshened up in the restroom, went and bought a case of Cokes and opened the store. I was supposed to have an employee come in at 1pm and another at 5pm…

The employee that was supposed to work from 1pm to close (9pm), decided to just never show up, he was also the other key holder. RS only had two key holders in the store back in those days. The one at 5pm was a part timer and could not close. So I ended up working until 9:30 that night.

I got home at 10pm, made some dinner and got to sleep at 11pm and it was Monday night.

So I was awake from 7:30am Saturday till 11:00pm the following Monday and was at work all but maybe 30 minutes. I think that was about 63.5 hours and I still had the rest of the week to work. It took me about a month to get my sleep schedule back into any semblance of normalcy.

I will starve and die in the gutter, before EVER working retail again.

I sometimes get bouts of insomnia. Usually when it happens, I’m just awake for about 30 hours or so. That’ll happen once or twice a month for me, and I’m pretty sure is just stress-related.

The longest I’ve gone was 75 hours when I was in my early 20s, which was due to a really bad allergic reaction to cedar pollen which kept me from breathing while laying my head down in any position, so I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. I was also running a pretty high fever while this happened. I probably drifted into microsleeps while sitting up a few times during that, but it was absolutely miserable.

I started having really bizarre auditory hallucinations after about the 40-hour mark. I’d hear a crowd of people laughing from behind the walls. Not like a malicious laugh, but like there was a stand-up routine happening in the next room over. Nobody else was home, no TVs were on, and it was like 3am so I knew what I was hearing wasn’t real, but convincing myself of that didn’t make the laughter stop.

I think I slept for about 13 hours straight after that.