The longest well-documented period without sleep that I have ever heard of is 264 hours and 12 minutes…about 11 days[1]. The 17 year old Randy Gardner broke the previous record of 260 hours for his high school science fair project. This was in 1965 and I haven’t read or heard of anything like it since.
When I started working at the Royal Ottawa Sleep Disorders Centre, I was completing my undergraduate degree in psychology. True to being a student, I could go to school all day, take a nap before work and then stay up all night at the sleep lab…with the help of a good dose of coffee. But I would crash hard afterwards. There was the odd summer day when I had to head to another job as a painter right after my sleep lab shift. I might have made it to 32 hours with only a nap, but my performance was poor. I remember how hard it was to stay steady on the ladder as I finished the paint job….bordering on dangerous I would now argue.
So just when should you cut off the wakefulness and think about getting some sleep? Back in 1997 a research team from Australia compared cognitive psychomotor performance after long periods of wakefulness to performance after drinking alcohol[2]. What they found was that if you stay awake for 17 hours, your hand-eye coordination would be about the same as if you drank enough alcohol to bring your blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level to 0.05%. At this BAC, it is illegal to drive a car in many areas, but people drive after being awake for 17 hours all the time!
Before you get to 17 hours, start thinking about safety and getting some shut-eye.
References
[1] Dement, W. (1972). Some must watch while some must sleep. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company.
[2] Dawson, D., & Reid, K. (1997). Fatigue, alcohol and performance impairment. Nature, 388, 235.