How to pay off a sleep debt

The claim: You can pay off a sleep debt by sleeping late on weekends.

The facts: Paying off a sleep debt is not so simple. In studies over the years, scientists have found that it can take a week or more for the cognitive and physiological consequences of poor sleep to wear off – even after increasing sleep.

In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night.

The scientists found that the recovery sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.

In a similar study last year, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that when subjects slept four hours a night over five days, and then recovered with eight hours a night over the following week, they still showed slight residual cognitive impairments a week later, even though they reported no sleepiness.

However, in another study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, scientists found that people recovered much more quickly from a week of poor sleep when it was preceded by a “banking” week that included nights with 10 hours of shut-eye.

In other words, if you know you are going to have a week of little sleep ahead of you, try loading up on sleep beforehand, not afterwards.

The bottom line: It takes more than a night of extra sleep to pay off a sleep debt.

Source from The New York Times

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