As a teenager I stayed up for 36 hours playing warcraft3 online.

In university I once spent 48 hours finishing a project. Afterwards I remember trying to count coins to get milk. After 4 or 5 unsuccessful counts my girlfriend at the time went and got milk while I slept for nearly 20 hours.

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 recommanf 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (⊙_⊙)

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

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.

5 days in 1994, and for no particular reason, just for funsies. Now I get cranky if I get denied my sleep schedule for more than 4 hours.

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.

I used to stay up all night when having fun on occasion. The longest was two nights and then I went to bed at around 8pm on the third day. It’s been awhile since I lived that life but I used to wake up feeling great and generally be in a great mood, and it helped me reset my sleep cycle so my insomnia would get less disruptive for awhile afterwards. That said, not sleeping is bad for you. If you’re doing it regularly you will have negative health effects, and if you stay up for more than a day you will start hallucinating and probably make bad decisions.

24 hours is sadly quite common for me. Max might have been just past 45 hours. I don’t think I ever reached 48.

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.