Sleep – According to Mark Mahowald, a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. "One complete night of sleep deprivation is as impairing in simulated driving tests as a legally intoxicating blood-alcohol level." Sleep is needed to regenerate certain parts of the body, especially the brain, so that it may continue to function optimally. After periods of extended wakefulness or reduced sleep neurons may begin to malfunction, visibly affecting a person's behavior.

Sleep deprived people do not have the speed or creative abilities to cope with making quick and logical decisions, nor do they have the ability to implement them well. Studies have demonstrated that a lack of sleep impairs one's ability to simultaneously focus on several different related tasks, reducing the speed as well as the efficiency of one's actions.

One study stated that people who sleep less than four hours per night are three times more likely to die within the next six years. (this increases exponentially in a zombie outbreak) Although the longest a human has remained awake was eleven days, rats that are continually deprived of sleep die within two to five weeks, generally due to their severely weakened immune system.

One of the symptoms of prolonged sleep deprivation is hallucinations. You don’t want to be hallucinating and waste your last bullet on the wrong zombie.
Just like a person cannot jog for three continuous days a person's brain cannot operate without rest breaks. Since different regions of the brain rest during different stages of the sleep cycle, sleep cannot be cut short. In fact, if the brain does not receive a break it will soon begin to shut down for periods of micro sleep. That can be inconvenient when running away from a zombie swarm.

Our suggestion is to invest in a good hammock and sleep high off the ground.

So what is considered the all-around healthiest sleep position?Many doctors say it’s lying on one’s back, with the head slightly elevated, about 10 – 30 percent. This is postulated to give the brain optimal blood circulation rather than congestion and also allows for more un-obstructed breathing, says Dr. Steven Park, a head and neck surgeon and member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. You see many native cultures sleeping this way, via hammock and other devices, rather than on flat services as in the West.