I have a seizure disorder that used to be triggered by sleep deprivation. To determine how my brain waves changed on no sleep, sometimes I would be given a sleep-deprived EEG where I was required to stay up for at least 24 hours, then go in and the techs in my neurologist’s office would basically do their damndest to cause a seizure - put me in a comfy recliner, then when I was almost asleep, there would be strobe lights or other sudden stimuli. As luck would have it, they were never able to induce a seizure in the office, then my trigger changed.
I also have kids now, who are 2 and 5. The youngest has been getting sick fairly frequently this year - she was healthy all her first year, probably largely due to breastfeeding since she immediately started getting sick when she stopped nursing, so I can only assume she’s making up for lost time. Anyway, kids are exhausting in general; sick kids make for some seriously awful and sleepless nights.
I had to vote “because I had to” because, well, sometimes I do. When I was in college, it was a regular thing; in fact, at one point in grad school I stayed up for 4 days straight… man, that sucked. At times I’ve been up all night for work related things. At other times I’ve stayed up all night for fun, like hanging out with some friends, going to a party, or playing videogames. At other times, I’ve had an early flight or the like and just stayed up all night instead of trying to sleep for like 2 hours which would have just had me feeling worse. Sometimes I just have insomnia.
These days, it probably ends up being about every month or two and is usually from insomnia, but occassionally for fun activities; I haven’t stayed up all night for work but once or twice in the last few years.
I’m 44 and have stayed up all night on occasion since I left school…
I stayed up all night to switch VCR tapes recording Diana’s funeral. I did this for my wife who was a BIG fan.
I stayed up all night driving from Knoxville, TN to Daytona Beach, FL when my grandmother had a stroke. This was 2002.
For some reason, I think I did it sometime in the past year, but I can’t remember when or why. Maybe I just want to convince myself I’m not all that middle-aged, so my brain is faking a memory… and doing a bad job at it.
I generally go to bed between 1 and 2 am. My work hours change day to day. Generally they are between 5am and 8pm. I like to have 2 hours from when I leave my house to when I’m on a call. Commute to my shop, listen to messages pull records if needed for any of those calls, load my work truck, head to the job site. With a 6 am job that has me leaving my house at 4am. If I Know I need to leave that early I try to go to bed earlier but try as I might I rarely manage to go to bed before 1am. When I find myself up at 1:30 on those nights I put in a movie and just stay up. This happens about once a week.
My business is only seven years old, and the Teletubbies aren’t my poison, but in general my answer is the same as ZipperJJ’s. Not for all-nighters, but if I’ve worked 'til past midnight I can’t just come in and fall asleep. I do watch TV to wind down.
In college the nights I stayed up all night were split between finishing projects after procrastinating, and socializing.
Nah, I used to stay up to 3-4am on Friday nights quite regularly - stopped about a month or two ago. But one of those nights, I think I stayed up the entire night… but maybe I caught an hour or so before my kid bounded out of bed.
Swing shift takes me from days to nights, 180 degrees opposite. Five a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and vice-versa. It adds up to 7 days & 7 nights strung throughout three weeks. Then I get a week off. I understand meeting many cars on the road at 4:30 a.m. during the week, but WHY the heck am I meeting them on Sunday morning? Where do you go, and why?
I don’t do it as often as I used to, but still often enough–certainly more than once every six months. I don’t have any sleep problems–just sometimes, when I get into a movie or a task I’m doing, I can become so engrossed in it that I lose all track of time and, next thing I know, the birds are chirping and the sun is coming out. But that’s not hard to do, since I normally don’t get to sleep until 2 a.m. or so anyway.
The longest I’ve gone was 50 hours without sleep. Things got really weird mentally at that point. It made me really appreciate the stamina and willpower of Navy SEALS during Hell Week, who go with a max of 4 hours sleep TOTAL over 5 1/2 days. I simply cannot comprehend how a human being can function like that, especially with the extreme physical demands that accompany this test.
Staying up all night is the only way I get any serious work done involving mental exercise and concentration; I get very easily distracted by such things as noise, smell, vibrations, activities going around etc etc. There are generally no distractions after midnight. I love staying up all night but it does take toll and screw you up your non-vampire normal life.
I go to bed when I see the sun starting to come up.
So, yeah, I stay up all night a lot. Every single day, in fact.
If I was to answer it in the spirit of “not sleeping much or not at all”…once every six months. Of course, if I was in school right now, it’d be probably once a week or more…that gets rough.
The title says “Have you stayed up all night”, but the options are about whether you do it regularly.
I have been a Spanish teenager and I’ve worked the night shift. Currently, neither of those applies, but I may still pull an occasional all-nighter due to some celebration (I’ll be sleepy through dinner, yet by the time I get home I’m not slepy any more).
I’ve suffered from anxiety/bipolar mixed states and very rarely manic states. I’ve been stayed out dancing at a club all night, and I’ve also been unable to sleep and stayed up playing video games all night.
I haven’t done any of these in several years, and the medication I must take usually prevents me from staying up more than an hour or so past my normal bedtime, unless I take it late. Not taking it at all (which would be required to stay up all night, unless I am having some kind of breakthrough symptoms) is not really conducive to my sanity, so it is not an option anymore. Even when my father was dying, I still took my meds, but in that case I didn’t really sleep.
I completely forgot about working the graveyard shift. I was the night baker at our town’s Dunkin’ Donuts for close to a year right out of high school. So long ago I forgot. But I’m not sure it counts, as I think I slept until 9pm or so, after dark, so it wasn’t all night. Nah, must have been up before nightfall at least once or twice.
i did it any number of times in college especially in my senior year to finish a project or whatever. today, it’s an occasional choice, usually connected to some other project i’m involved in with other people, and once in a blue moon at a cast party very late into the morning with fellow theater people. i think i hold the all-time party record of 6:45 am before everybody left my place.
i’m getting a little long in the tooth to do it very often any more.
I just remembered… in middle and high school, we would have “lock-ins” at school. It was basically a big slumber party for the whole school where the teachers would order pizza for us, everyone would bring tons of soda and sugary snacks and we would play indoor soccer all night in the gym and watch movies until we were so exhausted and sugared up that we were jittery and about to bounce off the walls. Then we’d all go home and pass out for most of the morning.
I don’t know how I forgot that. Could be that the sleep deprivation made me black it out.
