I believe my daily prepping digest suggested this article on How Long Can You Actually Survive Without Food, Water, or Sleep, and I thought the conclusions were interesting and informative.
Although I recommend reading the article now for the several interesting examples provided, and understanding that there are massive variables which factor into how long a person can live without something, the general advice is that a person can: “live 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, and 3 minutes without oxygen.” I like to add two additional ones, that a person can: “live 3 months without hope and 3 seconds without thinking.”
As the article points out, there are extreme examples of survival (like the guy that survived over a year without eating) and more normal ones, like prison hunger strikes. But even the normal examples show that the human body is often more resilient than we realize. It’s just that most of us, me included, have never been pushed to such extremes.
But it’s sleep deprivation that interested me the most because it’s a topic that rarely gets covered in prepping conversations. The articles states:
The survival lesson is blunt: sleep is not a luxury you cut, it’s equipment you maintain. In a real emergency — grid down, storm aftermath, security worries — the instinct is to stand watch all night, every night. Do that for three days and you become the biggest threat to your own family: an armed, paranoid, hallucinating sentry with drunk-level judgment.
Basically, your brain goes haywire and all of your rational decision-making goes straight out the window after only a night or two without sleep. (If I remember right, an episode of Mythbusters tested this by having participants stay up all night and then driving a test course, which they failed miserably.) The examples given in the article about Ranger School and SERE training sleep deprivation, where recruits were shouting orders to bushes, would be hilarious if the potential ramifications weren’t so serious.
Ultimately, it’s the conclusions about the rule of threes that you need hear:
The pattern across all three is the same one: the thing that kills you in an emergency is usually not the deprivation itself. It’s the bad decisions the deprivation causes on the way down. The dehydrated hiker walks away from the trail. The hungry group falls apart and stops working together. The sleepless sentry shoots at shadows.
We’re accustomed to functioning, more or less, normally. Aside from forgetting why I walked into a room at times or my wife forgetting where she left her phone, I’m not suddenly hallucinating that I’m being chased by a group of bandits and my wife isn’t in fear that aliens snatched her phone. But if were were severely sleep deprived, we might be. And that’s the problem.
Like the article concludes, our bodies – and especially our minds – have certain basic requirements to function properly. Yes, we can technically survive much longer, but survival doesn’t mean functional. So, even when times are tough, you need to give your body and mind what it needs to remain functional, including enough food, water, and sleep in regular intervals no matter what.
