Can you catch up on sleep?
Sleep debt grows when lost sleep accumulates over time. How effective is catching up with lost sleep over the weekend?
Sleeping well is a struggle with 3 kids (two under 5 years-old). If I'm honest, 7 hours of quality sleep probably only happens once or twice a week.
And that's on a good week.
I'm not alone. According to a 2014 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35 percent of Americans sleep less than seven hours per night. People who get less than seven hours of sleep per night are more likely to smoke cigarettes, be physically inactive, suffer from strokes or heart attacks, suffer from arthritis, asthma or cancer, suffer from chronic kidney disease, chronic lung disease, depression, diabetes or obesity. It’s pretty similar in other parts of the world too.
The list doesn't stop there. Lack of sleep can also worsen alertness and attention, cognitive performance, memory, and mood.
Sleep debt is the difference between the number of hours of sleep needed and the number of hours of actual sleep. If your body needs eight hours per night, but only gets six, then you have two hours of "sleep debt."
Going to sleep an hour or two later than usual for a couple of nights in a row can quickly add up. Although in my case, its waking kids, the most common activities that cause many people to lose sleep include work hours, commuting, going out, socialising, and watching TV. There's also a recent phenomenon of people staying up later for me-time, after kids have gone to bed, or they have finished extra work. They stay up later because they want to do things they enjoy, like that netflix binge.
Accumulating sleep debt doesn't always mean that we feel tired. We can be deceived into thinking it's not affecting us. Research has showed that people can cognitively adapt to chronic sleep restriction, not feeling especially sleepy even though their body is showing significant declines in physical and mental performance.
When we have a run of sleepless nights, it can be tempting to think we can just catch up on sleep and make up our sleep debt at the weekend.
But does this actually work?
Let me tell you about a study investigating that very question.
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