I stay up all night more than once a month but less than once a week for no other reason than “just cuz”.
Thanks everyone. I was kind of curious because I recently finished grad school, and while pulling allnighters is really common, I had never done it (although I have done plenty of latenighters) with my work. Until the very last day of editing my dissertation, which I really wanted to be the actual, final, last day, but the damned formatting wasn’t cooperating. So I was up till about 7:30 doing all that, and then I met my adviser at 9.
I’m not quite so nocturnal as you, but my schedule is a bit shifted with regard to the “norm.” I’m usually up to 2 or 3, and I regard not staying up until midnight as going to bed early. But I do like to be asleep before the sun rises. Otherwise the next day is just hell.
You also raise a good point. I guess I was considering being up all night to mean no sleep at all that day, or at least, not going to bed until the time you otherwise would wake up. It might be a bit strange that all of my allnighters have been of the skip-sleep-until-the-next-bedtime variety, but it seems they don’t have to be.
As I said, I did this with my dissertation. And it did suck, because I was too tired to care that the three-year project was done. It would have been nice to have that emotional satisfaction.
I forgot about red-eyes. That pretty much triples the number of allnighters for me. Most of my red-eyes have been transatlantic flights, and due to the discomfort, I don’t even try to sleep, since it would be a waste of time. It does help with the jetlag, though, since by the end of the day of arrival, I’m ready to sleep, regardless of what my internal clock says.
I’m 57 years old and I can remember only 3 times I stayed up all night - once in college finishing a report, once on spring break driving a ridiculously long way to visit a friend, and once as a supposedly mature adult driving with my husband and daughter to visit family.
Never again deliberately. I may have been up sick once, but it may have just been till about 4AM or so.
Other: I used to stay up all night frequently because I had a job that entailed working shifts of 24 hours or more.
I don’t do that job anymore - last time I stayed up right through the night was when my son broke his arm and I took him to hospital - by the time he’d been dealt with and was set up in a ward, it was getting light, so I just went home, washed, changed and went to work.
I always feel obligated to tell people that the PM part of Tylenol PM is just Benadryl (or it’s generic equivalents). If it’s cheaper, you can just take two of those and not have to take the acetaminophen.
I came in to say the same thing. Acetaminophen is really hard on your liver.
I would generally stay awake all day and night the first night of the week while I was working nights. I was terrible at nights- I’m a strictly daytime person.
Yeah, I tend to take the variety of Tylenol PM <generic> without the acetaminophen. Also try to take something else for pain if I need it. Supposedly even if I do take two a night it shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s really weird how PM without the Tylenol is so much more expensive than with. >.<
I have stayed up all night a very very few number of times in my life and they were for very specific events. The only one that comes to mind right now is when I would stay up all night to write plays for 24 hour play festivals. I’ve never stayed up all night to study or write papers as after about 1 or 2 I become completely useless at forming cogent thoughts. I always took the tack of going to bed at 2 regardless of how much I had done and wake up at 5 or 6 to finish the paper before class or do more studying.
I’ve never suffered from insomnia or an illness that would keep me up at night.
(I did have a professor tell me that I should never stay awake for more than 5 days in a row but that her hallucinations on that 5th day were better than anything she ever got off of acid.)
“I have stayed up all night on occasion, not more than once every six months.”
I’ve never had insomnia or studied or had work/project deadlines. Sometimes work scheduling has contributed (I have multiple part-time jobs that start and end at all hours), sometimes it’s been because I’m frantically scouring my dirty house before visitors arrive, and several times it’s been due to partying all night and having somewhere to be in the morning. But mostly it’s just that sometimes I don’t feel like going to bed.
I used to be strongly affected by lack of sleep but these days I am much healthier and my energy levels are very constant (due in part to managing my carbohydrate intake strictly) - the only consequence of missing a whole night of sleep is feeling a bit tired during the day and getting really drowsy by 7pm. Usually I never get feel ‘sleepy’ until I lay down in bed.
In my younger years, when I lived in what was then “West” Berlin, bars were open 24 hours a day, and most people didn’t even go out until 11:30 PM at the earliest - even on weekdays.
The trick was to go home after work, take a nap from say 6-11:00 PM, then get up, get dressed and go out.
So yeah, back then I would stay out until at least 7:00 AM or so. I can remember wishing taxis had curtains so I could sleep on the way home.
Pulled a few all night wild party/club nights in NYC as well.
Now, I am still a night owl, but generally go to bed about 1:00 AM.
It’s been a really long time since I’ve stayed up all night. Probably 25 years or more. Well, except for the horrible stretches of working 3rd shift… god, that sucked. Doubt I could do it any more, 1 AM is about as late as I can make it.
In my 20’s I occasionally stayed out drinking at a friend’s house all night. I have had a few nights of insomnia. But mainly… I love sleeping too damned much to give it up for a night!
I stayed up all night all the time in college due to putting stuff off. Then after that I stayed up for days on on building my business.
Now 10 years on my business is stable and solid but there are occasional days, maybe 1 or 2 a year (it gets less frequent every year) that I have to stay up all night to get stuff done.
After staying up all night I love to watch children’s television to wind down and fall asleep to. HUGE fan of the Teletubbies!
I stayed up all night in college. Once it was just to see the sunrise. Most of the times it was for schoolwork, or just because. Never because of sickness. And I don’t do it nowadays.
I think this should have been a multiple-choice poll, because numerous answers apply.
As a teenager, I would often stay up all night in the summer because I had my sleep phases out of whack, and I sorta enjoyed it.
As a college student, I pulled a few all-nighters before exams, or when I had an assignment due. I did NOT enjoy it.
As an adult, I pulled a handful that were work-related, and one (that I can recall) because I was having a horrible asthma flareup (shoulda gone to the ER with that one… it was bad enough that I couldn’t lie down to sleep, and when I went up a flight of stairs too fast the room sort of grayed out on me).
Let’s see… I’ve stayed up all night because I used to work nights. And I’ve stayed up all night just because I felt like it. I’ve stayed up all night because I was reading a good book. I’ve stayed up for multiple nights playing video games.
Staying up all night is no big deal. The longest I was ever up voluntarily is probably on the order of 60 hours or so, and no drug use was involved…
I find it very bizarre that there are adults who have never stayed up all night . . . especially if they’ve never witnessed a sunrise.
On the holiday of Shavuot, it is traditional to stay up the whole night studying Torah. My synagogue has the program of a Torah “game show” at midnight (usually “Who Wants To be A Matza Ball?”), then learning workshops until… I don’t remember, maybe four?
Anyway, I usually leave after the Matza Ball, but one year I stayed all the way through. I don’t think I got much learning done in the sense of paying attention to the lectures, but I was physically there. It turns out caffeine doesn’t help me stay awake, at least in the form of six cups of Coke. Pity.
I remember staying up a ridiculous number of hours during Idaho Girls’ Sate. I guess we made up for our serious days by going apeshit at night. I remember being shocked a couple of days in a row that we’d forgotten to sleep.
I can’t imagine being that energetic now.
I said other. I never stay up all night now, but when I was a CS major in grad school I often did. I had a program which needed to run a long time for my MS thesis, and I babysat it all night, checkpointing it every hour or so. (This was on our old PDP-11, so it being alive long enough to run all the way through was not a given. I got to play Empire on PLATO between checkpoints. Many of us would stay up all night the night before a project for the class we TAed was due, and then went out to breakfast at the IHOP down the street. Some summers I stayed up more often then not.
Back then you could get a lot better response from computers at 3 am than 3 pm.