Insomnia

Not sleeping won’t kill you directly, but it could lead to unpleasant ways of going to meet your maker. On one had there is sleep deprivation that can cause your reflexes and cognitive processes to be impaired, so that you make mistakes, cause accidents, etc… Over the long term, sleep deprivation can also lead to long term repercussions such as serious medical conditions that can arise when your body isn’t getting enough time to rebuild and reboot, but the causality is pretty thin. And for the record, the longest anyone’s every stayed awake is 11 days; a record held by Randy Gardner in 1964.

On the other hand, there is a condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia, which is a genetic condition that results from a mutated prion in the brain. Only 40 families in the world have been confirmed to have it, and only 100 people have ever been affected. But, it doesn’t sound pretty if you get it (but it’s rare that you would). Effects include panic, anxiety, hallucinations, rapid weight loss, complete sleep loss, dementia and eventually death, over the span of 2 years. Talk about a waking nightmare.