17 ms·

Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie

280 points by wallflower 8y ago

LoSboccacc 8y ago
...but weekend stress related headache is very real
kuu 8y ago
I think the research behind this news is quite weak: only 9 days and not that many participants (18 men and 18 women).
- xster 8y ago
  This needs to be top comment. Society's tolerance for bombastic 'journalistic' claims with no consequences is the source of so much of our present issues. Conclusions are cheap.
  - omeid2 8y ago
    > ...source of so much of our present issues. and past issues.
  - FooHentai 8y ago
    >is the source of so much of our present issues. Citation needed. Because hyperbole is no different in meta.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      >Because hyperbole is no different in meta Citation need... Oh wait, this is discussion, not an academic paper.
      - waterhouse 8y ago
        I've seen people say this a few times, and I think it is attacking a misreading of the comment (snarkily, to boot). Charitable interpretation: In a discussion, if someone says "Citation needed", it means "I'm skeptical and I'm asking for a citation" (which is quite reasonable), not "You should have supplied a citation before I asked for it" (which I would agree is unreasonable for statements one doesn't expect to be contentious).
      - presscast 8y ago
        > Oh wait, this is discussion, not an academic paper. It's literally an academic discussion insofar as it's about the technicalities of an academic paper. So yes, you really do need to support your arguments if you want them to be taken seriously.
    - cobbzilla 8y ago
      The replication problem has been well documented, at least for the social sciences. A cursory search for “replication crisis” will yield many results. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
      - Retra 8y ago
        The replication crisis is a problem, but it is almost certainly not the main source of societies ills.
    - 781 8y ago
      Here is your citation: https://www.sciencealert.com/replication-results-reproducibility-crisis-science-nature-journals https://www.sciencealert.com/replication-results-reproducibi...
- wilg 8y ago
  "9 days" really undersells that this is a study about the effect of weekends on sleep and they only tested one weekend.
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    Yeah, I haven’t read the article and after seeing this there is really no point. If one data point is what it gets to publish a study...
- cnaa 8y ago
  A thesis that journalism is the continued education for adults was posted recently. I won't name the originator of that idea. Education here: Your 60 work hours during the week are fine, you don't need more sleep. Doesn't Bezos own the WP?
- YayamiOmate 8y ago
  I wanted to ask whether this is a serious claim or one of those "might alter the risk" articles. Seems it even worse. Thanks for sparing many people's time with your comment.
- presscast 8y ago
  >18 men and 18 women This very much depends on statistical power. If the effect size is big enough, 36 participants can be plenty. I suspect the effect sizes of sleep deprivation are probably quite large.
- sz4kerto 8y ago
  Please support your argument with numbers. 36 participants can be plenty or can be absolutely insignificant. My partner is just in the process of getting subjects for an experiment and she's trying to estimate the required number of participants. In their case 30 participants would make the experiment useless, 40-42 would make it very powerful (significant). You can't judge the weakness of an experiment just based on the number of participants. Your comment might mislead others with not enough knowledge of stats I think.
  - c1as 8y ago
    Academia has had their chance. No one believes "studies" about personal life choices any more if the results conflict with each other every 5 years. It's just publication pressure (or worse, as other commenters have hinted at).
    - sz4kerto 8y ago
      > Academia has had their chance. You can't say that. (Ok, of course everyone has the right to her opinions.) The point of the scientific method is that it is, in many ways, self-correcting. It's getting addressed, albeit slowly. It will be counterproductive for all of us if we simply dismiss all results we're not comfortable with that it's only publication pressure. I mean -- you can say that personally, and it probably makes sense, but as a society we need to get social sciences and medicine into a better shape instead of just 'letting it go'.
      - pelasaco 8y ago
        > It will be counterproductive for all of us if we simply dismiss all results we're not comfortable with that it's only publication pressure. That's not what he said. Just those which "each 5 years" have completely different results.
    - Ragnarork 8y ago
      > Academia has had their chance Oh, so what should we go to now in order to try to expand our knowledge about this? What are you suggesting?
- rat9988 8y ago
  I don't think you can dismiss a scientific article without arguments. Please prove your points.
  - dkersten 8y ago
    A 9 day study includes only one weekend. In a study about weekends. One data point is never enough to make any inferences.
    - rat9988 8y ago
      It depends what you are trying to prove. To prove that catchup sleep doesn't work, you need to find at which weekend it stops working. If it's the first week end, you don't need to iterate, as the person's condition will only get worse.
      - dkersten 8y ago
        > If it's the first week end, you don't need to iterate, as the person's condition will only get worse. Then you let your subjects rest up and repeat it again another few times, to make sure that its repeatable and not a coincidence.
- el_cujo 8y ago
  I also take issue with how the article mentions that sleep is not a balance sheet, but doesn't really lay out that this was explicitly tested. They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong. I'm not necessarily saying I support a balance sheet view of sleep, I just think these kinds of articles are not very careful with the kind of wording they use. Also maybe I'm just living under a rock, but I don't feel like its that common to only get 5 hours of sleep every single weekday unless you're like a single parent with a baby (in which case you probably wouldn't magically get 8 hours on the weekend), I'd be more interested to see what happens if this was done in smaller spurts, like two consecutive days with three or four hours of sleep to emulate some work or school deadline approaching, but then 8 or 9 the rest of the week after its complete. As it stands now, the title of the article comes off as click bait because its a pretty fear-mongering conclusion drawn from what I consider to be pretty extreme circumstances.
  - wott 8y ago
    > They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong. Well, if you take a reference of 7 hours instead of 8, it is more possible. That's kind of what I was doing when I was in high-school: sleeping 5 hours or under on week days, so a total of about 24-25 hours over 5 days; and then sleeping 12 hours or more on week-end nights. So I was sleeping as much in those 2 days, as I was in the other 5, for a total of about 50 hours / week, which is around 7 hours per day on average. Note that I do not recommend this rhythm! Periodically during those years, I suffered from awful 3- to 5-days long periods during which I was... I don't know how to explain, like if there was a cotton wall between the world and me, I had no control over anything, everything was happening automatically, I had kind of visions of stuff that would happen not matter what I'd do, etc. I guess all of this was caused by sleep deprivation. Gee, I don't miss those periods... luckily it stopped after high-school. But all my life, I have had huge difficulties to fall asleep at night, and also suffered from stress, which doesn't combine well with the necessities of school times, work times, and other mandatory times: I generally managed to sleep earlier when there was no need to wake up early... If I ever need to wake up at 5 or 4 AM, I won't even manage to get any sleep (or 45 minutes with 10 sweaty 180 heartbeats per minute wake-up inside).
Golfkid2Gadfly 8y ago
No amount of sleep will make you feel well if your entire life is economically and, therefore, emotionally stressed because your country does not care about you. Provide affordable health care, affordable quality day care, living wages, and housing security, and people will sleep like babies all the time. America will be the richer.
- bitcoinmoney 8y ago
  Aren’t you describing Europe though?
  - RugnirViking 8y ago
    A wealthy and statistically happier and more free continent? Yes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
Is this model actually GDPR compliant? EDIT Either way I definitely don't want to trigger another conversation on the ethics of script/tracking/ad-blocking. I am wondering if this subscribe-with-your-data model is legally compliant with the GDPR. This is not a moral question (or at least I am not interested in a moral answer).
- rjf72 8y ago
  Without answering that question, just block scripts on the site and everything loads fine.
  - gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
    Really? I get a blank page (umatrix with only first party images and css enabled).
    - rjf72 8y ago
      Might depend on the specifics. I'm using Brave -> Lion Icon -> toggle Scripts Allowed to All Scripts Blocked. As an aside it also saves those settings per site making it quite convenient!
- krageon 8y ago
  No, it is not legally compliant. It maybe has lost a little bit of value to actually discuss this as it's been done so, so much. If you are very interested in what is and what is not compliant, you can read the resources published by the EU on the GDPR. They are very legible and relatively easy to understand.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > you can read the resources published by the EU on the GDPR. They are very legible and relatively easy to understand. Reading the guidelines is not the tricky part of GDPR. The hard part is: "I have a website, am I compliant or what do I have to change to become compliant?" Mapping the guidelines on to real world systems is where the difficult analysis comes in.
rjf72 8y ago
The referenced study [1] showed that taking people out of their regular sleeping patterns had detrimental effects, which is a surprise to nobody. It did not test for the effects of different habitual sleep patterns! Participants were required to engage in one of a variety of different sleep patterns over up to 11 nights, with no consideration given to their normal preexisting sleep pattern. Our bodies adjust to different behavior over time, and it's only after the adjustment that you can begin to meaningfully compare and contrast different behaviors. Imagine you take random people and require they start running 4 miles a day with no consideration given to the preexisting patterns of physical activity! Well it'd certainly give the media their clickbait of the day as they 'discover' running is bad for you. [1] - https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30098-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...
_pmf_ 8y ago
Father of two small children: no
- zwischenzug 8y ago
  Father of two here also, and I hear you! I think the point of this is to say that the negative effects on the body of lack of sleep on the body can't be reversed by the weekend catch up. That doesn't mean you don't feel better after that weekend lie in or catch-up nap! I have about 4 years of my life I can barely remember because it was work, on call, broken nights with babies, sleep, work, take turns to nap at weekends. Our second child was called Rachel because the only leisure time we had was taken to watch an episode of Friends every night before turning in and it worked on our subconscious. We had the energy to do nothing more (well, we obviously did one thing more... but I digress).
ferros 8y ago
I can’t speak for scientific analysis, but I can say that if I have had a disrupted week of sleep, a weekend catch up ‘resets’ me and serves its intended purpose (for me)
- bgentry 8y ago
  While it may feel this way, the science strongly indicates this is not the case. The study in the linked article is one proof point. Many others are summarized in Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”.
  - dasanman 8y ago
    But if it "feels that way", doesnt that have something to say as well?
    - freddie_mercury 8y ago
      In the absence of any actual evidence? Generally we take self-reported feelings as not especially strong evidence. Maybe all it says is they grew up thinking that "weekend sleeping helped catch-up" and now they only remember the confirming evidence and discard the disconfirming evidence to support their confirmation bias?
      - welly 8y ago
        I think the actual evidence, for the OP, is that he/she feels better. I don't think it matters if no one else feels better. OP isn't making a scientific claim other than they feel better after a weekend of sleep.
        freddie_mercury 8y ago
        I have a friend who deeply believes that he can drink unlimited amounts of beer and not get drunk. He will drive his car home after drinking 10 beers. Should his feelings count as evidence in any meaningful sense? Or do we generally assume that his feelings -- especially since they are contrary to science -- are not a good guide to what really happens?
smartbit 8y ago
https://archive.fo/0ruX4 https://archive.fo/0ruX4
sebslomski 8y ago
I highly recommend reading Matthew Walker‘s Why We Sleep [0] where stuff like the above mentioned is summed up. Great read! [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963
- CaRDiaK 8y ago
  Currently about two thirds through this. I agree that it's a great read, quite fascinating actually. Interestingly, he's conducted similar tests measuring a whole range of properties including; response, recovery, memory, health on hundreds of people and he draws the same conclusion as the article. It's certainly made me more aware of my own sleep habits. Highly recommended reading.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I loved the book, but I know so many functional adults living their entire life underslept, that I think it must miss compensating mechanisms.
- softwaredoug 8y ago
  I like this book, but not a lot of practica advice. A good compendium is The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter.
- ElijahLynn 8y ago
  Still waiting for an answer from Matthew Walker on his contrasting view from William Dement about Sleep Debt being unable to be paid back. https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256 https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/16/558058812/sleep-scientist-warns-against-walking-through-life-in-an-underslept-state https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/16/5580588...
mahgnous 8y ago
How do these paywall articles make it to top links?
MickerNews 8y ago
This would seem to imply that the concept of 'sleep debt' is a lie.
benj111 8y ago
For UK viewers, there was an episode of Twinstitute on iplayer that looked at sleep banking v power naps. The results of that seemed to suggest that sleep banking worked better than power naps, so I'm a bit confused why that works, but catch-up sleep doesn't?!
- matthewfelgate 8y ago
  Possibly because power naps don't achieve anything.
zokier 8y ago
I invite the authors (both from WP and the study) to do same 5 hours per workday and no catch-up during weekend and then tell me that catch-up sleep "is a lie".
- rocgf 8y ago
  It is a catch-up in terms of how you feel, but it doesn't repair the damage done to your overall health.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  The study authors, at least, are on the level. They've done some previous work on catch-up sleep and demonstrated that insulin sensitivity recovers to baseline, though not necessarily fast. Their claim here is that catch-up sleep doesn't seem to offset prior effects (e.g. by overcorrecting) or buffer against new deprivation (that is, you fall off abruptly to where the no-weekend people are). They didn't have anybody do 8 hours, no recovery on weekends, which is a shame, but they also didn't claim anything beyond "recovery sleep doesn't counteract/prevent the damage". The person who wrote the WP article, on the other hand, has an awful lot to answer for... That garbage title is only the start of the horrible misrepresentation.
mcv 8y ago
The primary reason why 'catch-up sleep' is a lie, not mentioned by this article, is that on Saturday 7 am children will start jumping on your bed. At least that's been my experience. More seriously, my body seems to have adapted to shorter sleep. I used to read about famous insomniacs like Napoleon who functioned quite well on only 2 hours of sleep per night, but lately my body seems to have become unable to sleep for 8 hours. I often sleep only 5 hours and that seems to work fine for me now.
- gpderetta 8y ago
  The same kids that you have to literally drag out of bed during schooldays!
  - mcv 8y ago
    Only the oldest. The youngest would prefer to come out of bed at 5:30. 7 is the most important number for a child to learn to recognise.
- feistypharit 8y ago
  Ever heard of "ok-to-wake" lights? Basically it's a programmable light to help children know when to do things, like get out of bed. We started using one with my daughter when she was about 18 months old. We still use them with her and her brother, now ages 5 and 7. https://www.aumilight.com/ https://www.aumilight.com/ https://shop.hatchbaby.com/pages/rest https://shop.hatchbaby.com/pages/rest https://www.keenglow.com/ https://www.keenglow.com/ (PLUG: I'm a stay-at-home dad and this last one is mine) They can help with other routine stuff too, like bedtime or screen time.
tachikomagenius 8y ago
Not a lie. It can't beat actual sleep at the time you feel tired but really helps a lot. - source: I've been doing it for years.
Amendeson530 8y ago
I don't care what the study says. I'm not going to stop trying.
zxcvbn4038 8y ago
Study or not, I feel great after sleeping in on Saturday mornings. I look forward to it all week. Sensational studies like this come out all the time, usually don’t hold up over time and peer review. Wish people would get so excited over shorter work weeks.
- rypskar 8y ago
  But the problem isn't sleeping long on Saturday, the problem is that it might not be enough to catch up to lost sleep during the week.
P_I_Staker 8y ago
When I say catch up on sleep, I simply mean I finally feel more rested. It was never meant to be taken literally. I wish all these people "debunking" it would understand that.
yaseer 8y ago
There seems to be some confusion in the comments over our anecdotal and subjective 'experience', and the conclusions of the study. Detrimental health effects, does not preclude feeling better. It's possible to feel good and still have detrimental health effects occurring. It feels good to eat cheeseburgers. We all feel better after catch-up sleep, that doesn't mean that detrimental effects haven't taken place. (This is leaving aside the debate about the study's sample size - which clearly requires further replication of results).
NoPicklez 8y ago
I find it odd that this has only come to light recently. When I was at University in 2011, I had a sleep psychologist take one of our psychology classes and it was well known back then that catching up on a week of sleep deprivation on the weekend doesn't work and only provides short term results. This article focuses on the caloric effects, but recently articles have been linking the research to purely the effects its has on your circadian rhythms.
Zitrax 8y ago
A recent Swedish study[1] following 43 880 people over 13 years mentions in the summary: "Possibly, long weekend sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep." [1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.12712 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.12712
- kabacha 8y ago
  Wow, what a contrast to this study of 36 people. Personally I feel that it's a bunch of placebo but a bunch of people I know swear by it. Nevertheless it's much harder to convince people to do what's more efficient compared to what _feels_ better when it comes to sleep. I for one feel much better if I wake up 7am sharp every day but it doesn't not feel that way naturally.
  - OJFord 8y ago
    It's not necessarily a placebo though right? I think 'catch-up' just isn't very well defined. I can be short of sleep and feeling awful each day of the working week, and then sleep in at the weekend and feel good that day relative to the last five. Have I 'caught-up'? Or does catching up mean negating long-term side-effects of sleep deprivation?
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      > Have I 'caught-up'? Or does catching up mean negating long-term side-effects of sleep deprivation? This is the issue, and it's why the person who titled this article ought to be ashamed. We know sleep-deprived people sleep extra if you let them, in amounts predicted by their sleep deprivation. We know the recovery sleep produces better results on a bunch of metrics than getting ~8 hours without extra recovery time. We also know that they don't make up lost sleep hours one-to-one; they add a few hours over a few days then return to baseline, and the fraction recovered declines as the amount of deprivation rises. So.. what does all of that mean? I know my athletic performance responds to recovery sleep; I've seen studies saying cognitive performance does too. Does insulin sensitivity recover fully? (The author's past work finds "sorta".) Does that recovery provide a better baseline when deprivation starts again, or does it just shift to a new target level regardless? (This implies it just moves to the lower level.) How about the same two questions for memory? For muscle and aerobic exercise? And then: does time with recovered functioning correct long-term damage, mitigate it, or just stop worsening it? Is the short-term "elevated amyloid plaque levels" result actually tied to Alzheimer's, or do they just share a mechanism? Summarizing a one-weekend insulin sensitivity result as though it settles 50 different questions sharing a broad label is ridiculous.
sergioisidoro 8y ago
I wonder if what people call "catch up sleep on weekends" is just "having 2 days of appropriate sleep". I would love to see an experiment where: Group A: Sleep 5h per day on weekdays, and "catch up on sleep" during the weekends. Group B: Sleep 5h per day on weekdays, and sleep the normal replenishing time on weekends (8-7h). And then compare the effects of the weekend sleep. I'm very sceptical of the "sleep debt" idea, which gives people the impression that they can do whatever they want with sleep and pay it back later. I honestly doubt you can pay any of the sleep debt you contracted over 2 days ago...
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm sad this wasn't tested. The subjects definitely moved back towards baseline, but if the extra sleep didn't produce any kind of overcompensation it's not super clear what it did. I know there are two other relevant results here. One finds that people recover a portion of recent lost sleep and that's it; a week on 5 hours/night and two weeks prompt similar recovery amounts, and 48 hours awake prompts similar recovery to 72 hours awake. Which certainly says you can't "pay off" arbitrary debt. The other one is from the same authors as this, finding that after chronic sleep deprivation, oral-glucose insulin response recovers within 3 days of 'free' sleep, but IV-glucose response isn't back to baseline after 5 days. Which suggests the added recovery sleep might just be a way to get back on track faster, rather than actually offsetting anything (at least for insulin). But I don't think I've ever seen a study actually comparing the two conditions.
QuamStiver 8y ago
The food analogy does not work and is a good example of people talking outside their area of expertise. Dieting on weekdays and "pigging out" once on pizza (what's wrong with pizza?) on the weekend would actually be fine. There is no evidence that food is like sleep and needs to be balanced on a daily basis.
- el_cujo 8y ago
  Yeah I was a little confused by reading this. I know several people who underwent dramatic weight loss but still had cheat days a few times a month, I don't really think that's uncommon. I mean I'm sure it slows your progress compared to not "cheating", but I've seen enough success stories to know it doesn't completely undo everything (depending on how bad you cheat I guess?)
lm28469 8y ago
Sleep is fun, people who regularly lack it will tell you they're "just fine" but they've been lacking sleep for so long that the baseline they're comparing themselves to is already skewed. Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen. Your body knows exactly how much sleep it needs. But that's not compatible with the "work hard, play hard" and hustler mentality I guess. Let's see how it impacts us when we get older, I'm fairly certain that the younger you are the more abuse your body can take, it usually has lasting consequences though. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-scary-ways-sleep-deprivation-affects-teen-physical-and-mental-health_us_55a7bd07e4b04740a3df0fb3 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-scary-ways-sleep-depr... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teen-sleep-crimes-adults_n_58b70880e4b019d36d0fec64 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teen-sleep-crimes-adults_n_58...
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen I do this once a year for one month for general health purposes. I am no less groggy in the morning. (No alarm means I wake up at 4AM or after 11 hours.) I am no more energetic. I sleep about the same number of hours as I did otherwise. Generally speaking, I noticed no physiological changes other than (a) craving sugar and (b) losing weight (due to cutting out alcohol and related foods). (Granted, I haven't been chronically sleep deprived for years.)
  - Ensorceled 8y ago
    If you haven't been chronically sleep deprived and haven't been using a caffeine/alcohol cycle to support that life style, why would you expect to see effects the parent said you would see? You're at the baseline they were already talking about.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > haven't been using a caffeine/alcohol cycle to support that life style I'm frequently acutely sleep deprived. (Which is relevant within the context of a "catch-up sleep" article.) And while I don't use alcohol and caffeine to support my sleep cycle, I certainly take each frequently. Cutting them out had no dramatic effect on my sleep quality. TL; DR Results from cutting out alcohol and caffeine may vary, and not everyone's body knows how much sleep it needs.
baxtr 8y ago
This seems to contradict a recent study that I came across [1]: The mortality rate among participants with short sleep during weekdays, but long sleep during weekends, did not differ from the rate of the reference group. Among individuals ≥65 years old, no association between weekend sleep or weekday/weekend sleep durations and mortality was observed. In conclusion, short, but not long, weekend sleep was associated with an increased mortality in subjects <65 years. In the same age group, short sleep (or long sleep) on both weekdays and weekend showed increased mortality. Possibly, long week- end sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712
CalRobert 8y ago
When I first had a kid, it was living hell. I mean, it was wonderful, and joyful (really, I'm not kidding) but waking up 5 times a night with a screaming 2 month old was effing brutal. I wore a 50 yard stare all the time, my colleagues tell me. Now, though, with an 18 month old I do a lot better - maybe even better than before having her. She still wakes up early (6:30 AM or so) BUT now that I know I absolutely, positively, HAVE to get to bed at a decent hour, I go to bed before 10 PM most nights - 9:30 or even 9:00 is not rare (and I find myself considering it a luxury). I used to know that I _should_ get to bed by 11:00 PM or so but often pushed it to 12:00 or 1:00 (mind you in college I tried to get to bed by 4 AM as a rule - I like night). I wake up before her even some mornings, and we have a couple hours of daddy-daughter time. We even watched the sun rise in winter; it's nice. But before her I HATED getting up early.
- blakesterz 8y ago
  It's really hard to explain to people just how effing brutal it can be for the first several years. Sleep is so random and uneven, it can really break a parent. I have a theory that people have evolved to forget just how bad the first years are, and that's the only reason people have more than one kid, because if we did really remember it all, we'd have all have serious Post Baby Trauma Disorder and no one would ever have more than one kid. You're right, it's just effing brutal.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Having two kids was the worst. Twice as many, still a noob parent. Poor kids, poor mum and dad. I mean we were nice to them but always exhausted. Was lucky. Got some good advice. Listened to it. Kids and parents are more happy now. We now have more than three and it is still way less stressful.
    - mkoivuni 8y ago
      What was the advice?
      - 8y ago
nfRfqX5n 8y ago
the idea of catching up never made sense to me because the damage is already done. you already suffered the effects from lack of sleep.
AltmousGadfly 8y ago
I don't care what the study says. I'm not going to stop trying.
rvn1045 8y ago
A good way to test wheather you’ve gotten enough sleep is to play a game of online chess. I make way more mistakes when I’ve slept less than optimal amounts.
b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
WashPo... Yeah, no thanks.
aasasd 8y ago
ITT: “my feelings say otherwise.”
- ekimekim 8y ago
  Also ITT: "I have no problems with this, so if you do it's obviously your fault."
roland35 8y ago
I currently have a newborn and I know this too well from experience! I can get a few extra hours on weekends but it definitely does not help once the work week starts again. One advantage of the extra time is that I finally have beaten my favorite game FTL with every ship! With our first baby I read through all the Game of Thrones books (I was hoping book 6 would be out by the time this kid was born!!)
IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
It may be a lie, but sleeping in till 10am and waking up peacefully is a wonderful feeling.
gambler 8y ago
Maybe catch-up sleep doesn't work to fully repair the damage if you're totally wrecking your body during workdays, but it definitely helps if you're on the borderline. I usually sleep more on the weekends. If I don't, I usually start to manifest cold-like symptoms, indicating that my immune system is struggling. To me, this suggest that catch-up sleep definitely helps in some regards. I can't speak about long-term effects, but I don't think having a malfunctioning immune system would be good for me in the long run either. This is one of those cases where the effect is so clearly pronounced, I utterly don't care what "the medical science" says on the subject. Maybe it's different for different people. (I generally do get 6-7 hours of sleep on any day, though. No idea how people sleep less than 6 hours a day without collapsing at the end of the week.)
Folcon 8y ago
Are there any good suggestions for what to do if "just get more sleep" isn't really working? These sort of articles really frustrate me, their suggestions always feel fairly weak. I have difficulties falling asleep and a little bit of apnea and getting a grip on how to get consistent "gold standard" sleep is really frustrating. I've tried forcing myself to sleep early using sleep meds, which doesn't really seem to work well or be a really good long term solution. Cutting coffee and/or alcohol for periods which doesn't seem to have any significant effects. Irritatingly the most successful solution I found for a period was movement, as in someone driving me in a car on a long drive, I'd fall asleep in seconds into a deep sleep. Except that doesn't seem to happen on a train or taxi (not sure why yet), and it would be problematic working out how to do that routinely.
rhacker 8y ago
I don't know about "weekend" catch-up sleep being different than other kinds of catch up sleep, but I just had a session where I pretty much got 1 hour of sleep in a 24 hour period. The following day I slept 10 hours. Now I know that's not exactly catch up, but I hardly ever sleep more than 7. It's hard for me to sleep more than 7. So if catch up is a lie, why is the only time I am able to sleep 10 if I had a missed day?
- hhjinks 8y ago
  Catching up on sleep is usually said in the context of "I'll sleep more in the weekend to counteract the negative effects of sleeping 4 hours a night during the week". That is not how it works, since catchup sleep won't really do anything to reverse the effects of prolonged lack of sleep. You certainly will sleep longer when more tired, but it will not counteract the long term negative effects of sleeping too little.
JTbane 8y ago
The problem is the 8 hour workday for me. Getting ready for work takes an hour, commute is at least an hour by train each way, so getting enough sleep is tough.
manigandham 8y ago
Great JRE podcast episode with Matthew Walker (Professor of Neuroscience, Founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
throwaway-1283 8y ago
going low carb (+ no sugar), cutting alcohol helped me naturally wake up more refreshed with less than 7 hrs sleep...
ElijahLynn 8y ago
This title is untrue according to research done by Dr. William Dement at Stanford. In his book Promise of Sleep he says they did a study where people were put in a room at an earlier than bedtime time, no electronics or devices or lights. They ended up sleeping 1-2 hours longer (closer to 10 hours) for a week and then it started to reach normal levels (closer to 8 hours) over the second week. The premise of the book Promise of Sleep is "Sleep Debt" and they proved you can pay back Sleep Debt up to about 1-2 weeks worth and the rest is absorbed by the body.
- ElijahLynn 8y ago
  From the WP article "While weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of insufficient sleep..." so here they are admitting there are some benefits from catching up on sleep debt, which is incompatible with the title that it is a lie. They then go on to "...those gains were wiped out when people plunged right back into their same sleep-deprived schedule the next Monday.", which again is incompatible with the title because they are saying that there is benefit but most just kill the benefit, so weekend sleep catch-up is not a lie, but Carolyn Y. Johnson (or their Editor in Chief) are lying with the title. That title is click-bait for sure.
Gpetrium 8y ago
I think that the real answer is that we do not know the answer yet. It is likely that both aspects are correct to some degree, I'll explain my take as of now: There is a real cost to sleeping less or sleeping too much and that some will feel the impact more than others also depending on the environment they are in (e.g increased stress, etc). Depending on the combined variables in conjunction to lack of sleep, some may see positive gains by 'catching-up' on the weekend (think of parents for example), although it is likely that a marginal amount of lack of sleep will continue to accumulate over longer periods of time. This in turn can potentially lead to increased risk of heart attack and other issues. The lack of sleep scenario can be seeing a little with the same lens as smoking, results can vary from person to person, but on average, it has a real negative impact when done often or under unfavorable circumstances.
- bksenior 8y ago
  I bet it's much simpler than that. Just like oxytocin amount, being prone to cancer and everything else there is probably large genetic predisposition and response. I bet the range range is enormous as to how sleep affects people.
thisisweirdok 8y ago
I think catch-up sleep is just an excuse we grant ourselves for sleeping more on the weekends... we've been conditioned to feel bad for not feeling productive, so we need to grant ourselves special permission.
k__ 8y ago
I stopped setting an alarm and sleep 9h a day now. Don't know if this is good or bad.
alexozer 8y ago
Blue light blocking glasses have had such a tremendously positive effect on my sleep habits (earlier bedtime, better sleep quality) that at this point I genuinely feel bad for people who don't use them. I got a pair that claims to block a very large amount of blue light (at the expense of a distinct orange tint), and just wear them after it gets dark. It makes sense that they work; your brain uses blue light to time the release of melatonin and such, and our ancestors were only exposed to non-blue light from sitting besides the campfire socializing after the sun went down. Wearing these allows me to experience much less of a consequence for using a computer at night which I simply cannot get myself to avoid.

280 points by wallflower 8y ago

LoSboccacc 8y ago

...but weekend stress related headache is very real

kuu 8y ago

I think the research behind this news is quite weak: only 9 days and not that many participants (18 men and 18 women).

xster 8y ago
This needs to be top comment. Society's tolerance for bombastic 'journalistic' claims with no consequences is the source of so much of our present issues. Conclusions are cheap.
- omeid2 8y ago
  > ...source of so much of our present issues. and past issues.
- FooHentai 8y ago
  >is the source of so much of our present issues. Citation needed. Because hyperbole is no different in meta.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    >Because hyperbole is no different in meta Citation need... Oh wait, this is discussion, not an academic paper.
    - waterhouse 8y ago
      I've seen people say this a few times, and I think it is attacking a misreading of the comment (snarkily, to boot). Charitable interpretation: In a discussion, if someone says "Citation needed", it means "I'm skeptical and I'm asking for a citation" (which is quite reasonable), not "You should have supplied a citation before I asked for it" (which I would agree is unreasonable for statements one doesn't expect to be contentious).
    - presscast 8y ago
      > Oh wait, this is discussion, not an academic paper. It's literally an academic discussion insofar as it's about the technicalities of an academic paper. So yes, you really do need to support your arguments if you want them to be taken seriously.
  - cobbzilla 8y ago
    The replication problem has been well documented, at least for the social sciences. A cursory search for “replication crisis” will yield many results. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
    - Retra 8y ago
      The replication crisis is a problem, but it is almost certainly not the main source of societies ills.
  - 781 8y ago
    Here is your citation: https://www.sciencealert.com/replication-results-reproducibility-crisis-science-nature-journals https://www.sciencealert.com/replication-results-reproducibi...
wilg 8y ago
"9 days" really undersells that this is a study about the effect of weekends on sleep and they only tested one weekend.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  Yeah, I haven’t read the article and after seeing this there is really no point. If one data point is what it gets to publish a study...
cnaa 8y ago
A thesis that journalism is the continued education for adults was posted recently. I won't name the originator of that idea. Education here: Your 60 work hours during the week are fine, you don't need more sleep. Doesn't Bezos own the WP?
YayamiOmate 8y ago
I wanted to ask whether this is a serious claim or one of those "might alter the risk" articles. Seems it even worse. Thanks for sparing many people's time with your comment.
presscast 8y ago
>18 men and 18 women This very much depends on statistical power. If the effect size is big enough, 36 participants can be plenty. I suspect the effect sizes of sleep deprivation are probably quite large.
sz4kerto 8y ago
Please support your argument with numbers. 36 participants can be plenty or can be absolutely insignificant. My partner is just in the process of getting subjects for an experiment and she's trying to estimate the required number of participants. In their case 30 participants would make the experiment useless, 40-42 would make it very powerful (significant). You can't judge the weakness of an experiment just based on the number of participants. Your comment might mislead others with not enough knowledge of stats I think.
- c1as 8y ago
  Academia has had their chance. No one believes "studies" about personal life choices any more if the results conflict with each other every 5 years. It's just publication pressure (or worse, as other commenters have hinted at).
  - sz4kerto 8y ago
    > Academia has had their chance. You can't say that. (Ok, of course everyone has the right to her opinions.) The point of the scientific method is that it is, in many ways, self-correcting. It's getting addressed, albeit slowly. It will be counterproductive for all of us if we simply dismiss all results we're not comfortable with that it's only publication pressure. I mean -- you can say that personally, and it probably makes sense, but as a society we need to get social sciences and medicine into a better shape instead of just 'letting it go'.
    - pelasaco 8y ago
      > It will be counterproductive for all of us if we simply dismiss all results we're not comfortable with that it's only publication pressure. That's not what he said. Just those which "each 5 years" have completely different results.
  - Ragnarork 8y ago
    > Academia has had their chance Oh, so what should we go to now in order to try to expand our knowledge about this? What are you suggesting?
rat9988 8y ago
I don't think you can dismiss a scientific article without arguments. Please prove your points.
- dkersten 8y ago
  A 9 day study includes only one weekend. In a study about weekends. One data point is never enough to make any inferences.
  - rat9988 8y ago
    It depends what you are trying to prove. To prove that catchup sleep doesn't work, you need to find at which weekend it stops working. If it's the first week end, you don't need to iterate, as the person's condition will only get worse.
    - dkersten 8y ago
      > If it's the first week end, you don't need to iterate, as the person's condition will only get worse. Then you let your subjects rest up and repeat it again another few times, to make sure that its repeatable and not a coincidence.
el_cujo 8y ago
I also take issue with how the article mentions that sleep is not a balance sheet, but doesn't really lay out that this was explicitly tested. They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong. I'm not necessarily saying I support a balance sheet view of sleep, I just think these kinds of articles are not very careful with the kind of wording they use. Also maybe I'm just living under a rock, but I don't feel like its that common to only get 5 hours of sleep every single weekday unless you're like a single parent with a baby (in which case you probably wouldn't magically get 8 hours on the weekend), I'd be more interested to see what happens if this was done in smaller spurts, like two consecutive days with three or four hours of sleep to emulate some work or school deadline approaching, but then 8 or 9 the rest of the week after its complete. As it stands now, the title of the article comes off as click bait because its a pretty fear-mongering conclusion drawn from what I consider to be pretty extreme circumstances.
- wott 8y ago
  > They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong. Well, if you take a reference of 7 hours instead of 8, it is more possible. That's kind of what I was doing when I was in high-school: sleeping 5 hours or under on week days, so a total of about 24-25 hours over 5 days; and then sleeping 12 hours or more on week-end nights. So I was sleeping as much in those 2 days, as I was in the other 5, for a total of about 50 hours / week, which is around 7 hours per day on average. Note that I do not recommend this rhythm! Periodically during those years, I suffered from awful 3- to 5-days long periods during which I was... I don't know how to explain, like if there was a cotton wall between the world and me, I had no control over anything, everything was happening automatically, I had kind of visions of stuff that would happen not matter what I'd do, etc. I guess all of this was caused by sleep deprivation. Gee, I don't miss those periods... luckily it stopped after high-school. But all my life, I have had huge difficulties to fall asleep at night, and also suffered from stress, which doesn't combine well with the necessities of school times, work times, and other mandatory times: I generally managed to sleep earlier when there was no need to wake up early... If I ever need to wake up at 5 or 4 AM, I won't even manage to get any sleep (or 45 minutes with 10 sweaty 180 heartbeats per minute wake-up inside).

Golfkid2Gadfly 8y ago

No amount of sleep will make you feel well if your entire life is economically and, therefore, emotionally stressed because your country does not care about you. Provide affordable health care, affordable quality day care, living wages, and housing security, and people will sleep like babies all the time. America will be the richer.

bitcoinmoney 8y ago
Aren’t you describing Europe though?
- RugnirViking 8y ago
  A wealthy and statistically happier and more free continent? Yes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gdfasfklshg4 8y ago

Is this model actually GDPR compliant? EDIT Either way I definitely don't want to trigger another conversation on the ethics of script/tracking/ad-blocking. I am wondering if this subscribe-with-your-data model is legally compliant with the GDPR. This is not a moral question (or at least I am not interested in a moral answer).

rjf72 8y ago
Without answering that question, just block scripts on the site and everything loads fine.
- gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
  Really? I get a blank page (umatrix with only first party images and css enabled).
  - rjf72 8y ago
    Might depend on the specifics. I'm using Brave -> Lion Icon -> toggle Scripts Allowed to All Scripts Blocked. As an aside it also saves those settings per site making it quite convenient!
krageon 8y ago
No, it is not legally compliant. It maybe has lost a little bit of value to actually discuss this as it's been done so, so much. If you are very interested in what is and what is not compliant, you can read the resources published by the EU on the GDPR. They are very legible and relatively easy to understand.
- speedplane 8y ago
  > you can read the resources published by the EU on the GDPR. They are very legible and relatively easy to understand. Reading the guidelines is not the tricky part of GDPR. The hard part is: "I have a website, am I compliant or what do I have to change to become compliant?" Mapping the guidelines on to real world systems is where the difficult analysis comes in.

rjf72 8y ago

The referenced study [1] showed that taking people out of their regular sleeping patterns had detrimental effects, which is a surprise to nobody. It did not test for the effects of different habitual sleep patterns! Participants were required to engage in one of a variety of different sleep patterns over up to 11 nights, with no consideration given to their normal preexisting sleep pattern. Our bodies adjust to different behavior over time, and it's only after the adjustment that you can begin to meaningfully compare and contrast different behaviors. Imagine you take random people and require they start running 4 miles a day with no consideration given to the preexisting patterns of physical activity! Well it'd certainly give the media their clickbait of the day as they 'discover' running is bad for you. [1] - https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30098-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...

_pmf_ 8y ago

Father of two small children: no

zwischenzug 8y ago
Father of two here also, and I hear you! I think the point of this is to say that the negative effects on the body of lack of sleep on the body can't be reversed by the weekend catch up. That doesn't mean you don't feel better after that weekend lie in or catch-up nap! I have about 4 years of my life I can barely remember because it was work, on call, broken nights with babies, sleep, work, take turns to nap at weekends. Our second child was called Rachel because the only leisure time we had was taken to watch an episode of Friends every night before turning in and it worked on our subconscious. We had the energy to do nothing more (well, we obviously did one thing more... but I digress).

ferros 8y ago

I can’t speak for scientific analysis, but I can say that if I have had a disrupted week of sleep, a weekend catch up ‘resets’ me and serves its intended purpose (for me)

bgentry 8y ago
While it may feel this way, the science strongly indicates this is not the case. The study in the linked article is one proof point. Many others are summarized in Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”.
- dasanman 8y ago
  But if it "feels that way", doesnt that have something to say as well?
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    In the absence of any actual evidence? Generally we take self-reported feelings as not especially strong evidence. Maybe all it says is they grew up thinking that "weekend sleeping helped catch-up" and now they only remember the confirming evidence and discard the disconfirming evidence to support their confirmation bias?
    - welly 8y ago
      I think the actual evidence, for the OP, is that he/she feels better. I don't think it matters if no one else feels better. OP isn't making a scientific claim other than they feel better after a weekend of sleep.
      - freddie_mercury 8y ago
        I have a friend who deeply believes that he can drink unlimited amounts of beer and not get drunk. He will drive his car home after drinking 10 beers. Should his feelings count as evidence in any meaningful sense? Or do we generally assume that his feelings -- especially since they are contrary to science -- are not a good guide to what really happens?

smartbit 8y ago

https://archive.fo/0ruX4 https://archive.fo/0ruX4

sebslomski 8y ago

I highly recommend reading Matthew Walker‘s Why We Sleep [0] where stuff like the above mentioned is summed up. Great read! [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963

CaRDiaK 8y ago
Currently about two thirds through this. I agree that it's a great read, quite fascinating actually. Interestingly, he's conducted similar tests measuring a whole range of properties including; response, recovery, memory, health on hundreds of people and he draws the same conclusion as the article. It's certainly made me more aware of my own sleep habits. Highly recommended reading.
sametmax 8y ago
I loved the book, but I know so many functional adults living their entire life underslept, that I think it must miss compensating mechanisms.
softwaredoug 8y ago
I like this book, but not a lot of practica advice. A good compendium is The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter.
ElijahLynn 8y ago
Still waiting for an answer from Matthew Walker on his contrasting view from William Dement about Sleep Debt being unable to be paid back. https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256 https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/16/558058812/sleep-scientist-warns-against-walking-through-life-in-an-underslept-state https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/16/5580588...

mahgnous 8y ago

How do these paywall articles make it to top links?

MickerNews 8y ago

This would seem to imply that the concept of 'sleep debt' is a lie.

benj111 8y ago

For UK viewers, there was an episode of Twinstitute on iplayer that looked at sleep banking v power naps. The results of that seemed to suggest that sleep banking worked better than power naps, so I'm a bit confused why that works, but catch-up sleep doesn't?!

matthewfelgate 8y ago
Possibly because power naps don't achieve anything.

zokier 8y ago

I invite the authors (both from WP and the study) to do same 5 hours per workday and no catch-up during weekend and then tell me that catch-up sleep "is a lie".

rocgf 8y ago
It is a catch-up in terms of how you feel, but it doesn't repair the damage done to your overall health.
Bartweiss 8y ago
The study authors, at least, are on the level. They've done some previous work on catch-up sleep and demonstrated that insulin sensitivity recovers to baseline, though not necessarily fast. Their claim here is that catch-up sleep doesn't seem to offset prior effects (e.g. by overcorrecting) or buffer against new deprivation (that is, you fall off abruptly to where the no-weekend people are). They didn't have anybody do 8 hours, no recovery on weekends, which is a shame, but they also didn't claim anything beyond "recovery sleep doesn't counteract/prevent the damage". The person who wrote the WP article, on the other hand, has an awful lot to answer for... That garbage title is only the start of the horrible misrepresentation.

mcv 8y ago

The primary reason why 'catch-up sleep' is a lie, not mentioned by this article, is that on Saturday 7 am children will start jumping on your bed. At least that's been my experience. More seriously, my body seems to have adapted to shorter sleep. I used to read about famous insomniacs like Napoleon who functioned quite well on only 2 hours of sleep per night, but lately my body seems to have become unable to sleep for 8 hours. I often sleep only 5 hours and that seems to work fine for me now.

gpderetta 8y ago
The same kids that you have to literally drag out of bed during schooldays!
- mcv 8y ago
  Only the oldest. The youngest would prefer to come out of bed at 5:30. 7 is the most important number for a child to learn to recognise.
feistypharit 8y ago
Ever heard of "ok-to-wake" lights? Basically it's a programmable light to help children know when to do things, like get out of bed. We started using one with my daughter when she was about 18 months old. We still use them with her and her brother, now ages 5 and 7. https://www.aumilight.com/ https://www.aumilight.com/ https://shop.hatchbaby.com/pages/rest https://shop.hatchbaby.com/pages/rest https://www.keenglow.com/ https://www.keenglow.com/ (PLUG: I'm a stay-at-home dad and this last one is mine) They can help with other routine stuff too, like bedtime or screen time.

tachikomagenius 8y ago

Not a lie. It can't beat actual sleep at the time you feel tired but really helps a lot. - source: I've been doing it for years.

Amendeson530 8y ago

I don't care what the study says. I'm not going to stop trying.

zxcvbn4038 8y ago

Study or not, I feel great after sleeping in on Saturday mornings. I look forward to it all week. Sensational studies like this come out all the time, usually don’t hold up over time and peer review. Wish people would get so excited over shorter work weeks.

rypskar 8y ago
But the problem isn't sleeping long on Saturday, the problem is that it might not be enough to catch up to lost sleep during the week.

P_I_Staker 8y ago

When I say catch up on sleep, I simply mean I finally feel more rested. It was never meant to be taken literally. I wish all these people "debunking" it would understand that.

yaseer 8y ago

There seems to be some confusion in the comments over our anecdotal and subjective 'experience', and the conclusions of the study. Detrimental health effects, does not preclude feeling better. It's possible to feel good and still have detrimental health effects occurring. It feels good to eat cheeseburgers. We all feel better after catch-up sleep, that doesn't mean that detrimental effects haven't taken place. (This is leaving aside the debate about the study's sample size - which clearly requires further replication of results).

NoPicklez 8y ago

I find it odd that this has only come to light recently. When I was at University in 2011, I had a sleep psychologist take one of our psychology classes and it was well known back then that catching up on a week of sleep deprivation on the weekend doesn't work and only provides short term results. This article focuses on the caloric effects, but recently articles have been linking the research to purely the effects its has on your circadian rhythms.

Zitrax 8y ago

A recent Swedish study[1] following 43 880 people over 13 years mentions in the summary: "Possibly, long weekend sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep." [1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.12712 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.12712

kabacha 8y ago
Wow, what a contrast to this study of 36 people. Personally I feel that it's a bunch of placebo but a bunch of people I know swear by it. Nevertheless it's much harder to convince people to do what's more efficient compared to what _feels_ better when it comes to sleep. I for one feel much better if I wake up 7am sharp every day but it doesn't not feel that way naturally.
- OJFord 8y ago
  It's not necessarily a placebo though right? I think 'catch-up' just isn't very well defined. I can be short of sleep and feeling awful each day of the working week, and then sleep in at the weekend and feel good that day relative to the last five. Have I 'caught-up'? Or does catching up mean negating long-term side-effects of sleep deprivation?
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    > Have I 'caught-up'? Or does catching up mean negating long-term side-effects of sleep deprivation? This is the issue, and it's why the person who titled this article ought to be ashamed. We know sleep-deprived people sleep extra if you let them, in amounts predicted by their sleep deprivation. We know the recovery sleep produces better results on a bunch of metrics than getting ~8 hours without extra recovery time. We also know that they don't make up lost sleep hours one-to-one; they add a few hours over a few days then return to baseline, and the fraction recovered declines as the amount of deprivation rises. So.. what does all of that mean? I know my athletic performance responds to recovery sleep; I've seen studies saying cognitive performance does too. Does insulin sensitivity recover fully? (The author's past work finds "sorta".) Does that recovery provide a better baseline when deprivation starts again, or does it just shift to a new target level regardless? (This implies it just moves to the lower level.) How about the same two questions for memory? For muscle and aerobic exercise? And then: does time with recovered functioning correct long-term damage, mitigate it, or just stop worsening it? Is the short-term "elevated amyloid plaque levels" result actually tied to Alzheimer's, or do they just share a mechanism? Summarizing a one-weekend insulin sensitivity result as though it settles 50 different questions sharing a broad label is ridiculous.

sergioisidoro 8y ago

I wonder if what people call "catch up sleep on weekends" is just "having 2 days of appropriate sleep". I would love to see an experiment where: Group A: Sleep 5h per day on weekdays, and "catch up on sleep" during the weekends. Group B: Sleep 5h per day on weekdays, and sleep the normal replenishing time on weekends (8-7h). And then compare the effects of the weekend sleep. I'm very sceptical of the "sleep debt" idea, which gives people the impression that they can do whatever they want with sleep and pay it back later. I honestly doubt you can pay any of the sleep debt you contracted over 2 days ago...

Bartweiss 8y ago
Yeah, I'm sad this wasn't tested. The subjects definitely moved back towards baseline, but if the extra sleep didn't produce any kind of overcompensation it's not super clear what it did. I know there are two other relevant results here. One finds that people recover a portion of recent lost sleep and that's it; a week on 5 hours/night and two weeks prompt similar recovery amounts, and 48 hours awake prompts similar recovery to 72 hours awake. Which certainly says you can't "pay off" arbitrary debt. The other one is from the same authors as this, finding that after chronic sleep deprivation, oral-glucose insulin response recovers within 3 days of 'free' sleep, but IV-glucose response isn't back to baseline after 5 days. Which suggests the added recovery sleep might just be a way to get back on track faster, rather than actually offsetting anything (at least for insulin). But I don't think I've ever seen a study actually comparing the two conditions.

QuamStiver 8y ago

The food analogy does not work and is a good example of people talking outside their area of expertise. Dieting on weekdays and "pigging out" once on pizza (what's wrong with pizza?) on the weekend would actually be fine. There is no evidence that food is like sleep and needs to be balanced on a daily basis.

el_cujo 8y ago
Yeah I was a little confused by reading this. I know several people who underwent dramatic weight loss but still had cheat days a few times a month, I don't really think that's uncommon. I mean I'm sure it slows your progress compared to not "cheating", but I've seen enough success stories to know it doesn't completely undo everything (depending on how bad you cheat I guess?)

lm28469 8y ago

Sleep is fun, people who regularly lack it will tell you they're "just fine" but they've been lacking sleep for so long that the baseline they're comparing themselves to is already skewed. Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen. Your body knows exactly how much sleep it needs. But that's not compatible with the "work hard, play hard" and hustler mentality I guess. Let's see how it impacts us when we get older, I'm fairly certain that the younger you are the more abuse your body can take, it usually has lasting consequences though. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-scary-ways-sleep-deprivation-affects-teen-physical-and-mental-health_us_55a7bd07e4b04740a3df0fb3 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-scary-ways-sleep-depr... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teen-sleep-crimes-adults_n_58b70880e4b019d36d0fec64 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teen-sleep-crimes-adults_n_58...

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen I do this once a year for one month for general health purposes. I am no less groggy in the morning. (No alarm means I wake up at 4AM or after 11 hours.) I am no more energetic. I sleep about the same number of hours as I did otherwise. Generally speaking, I noticed no physiological changes other than (a) craving sugar and (b) losing weight (due to cutting out alcohol and related foods). (Granted, I haven't been chronically sleep deprived for years.)
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  If you haven't been chronically sleep deprived and haven't been using a caffeine/alcohol cycle to support that life style, why would you expect to see effects the parent said you would see? You're at the baseline they were already talking about.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > haven't been using a caffeine/alcohol cycle to support that life style I'm frequently acutely sleep deprived. (Which is relevant within the context of a "catch-up sleep" article.) And while I don't use alcohol and caffeine to support my sleep cycle, I certainly take each frequently. Cutting them out had no dramatic effect on my sleep quality. TL; DR Results from cutting out alcohol and caffeine may vary, and not everyone's body knows how much sleep it needs.

baxtr 8y ago

This seems to contradict a recent study that I came across [1]: The mortality rate among participants with short sleep during weekdays, but long sleep during weekends, did not differ from the rate of the reference group. Among individuals ≥65 years old, no association between weekend sleep or weekday/weekend sleep durations and mortality was observed. In conclusion, short, but not long, weekend sleep was associated with an increased mortality in subjects <65 years. In the same age group, short sleep (or long sleep) on both weekdays and weekend showed increased mortality. Possibly, long week- end sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712

CalRobert 8y ago

When I first had a kid, it was living hell. I mean, it was wonderful, and joyful (really, I'm not kidding) but waking up 5 times a night with a screaming 2 month old was effing brutal. I wore a 50 yard stare all the time, my colleagues tell me. Now, though, with an 18 month old I do a lot better - maybe even better than before having her. She still wakes up early (6:30 AM or so) BUT now that I know I absolutely, positively, HAVE to get to bed at a decent hour, I go to bed before 10 PM most nights - 9:30 or even 9:00 is not rare (and I find myself considering it a luxury). I used to know that I _should_ get to bed by 11:00 PM or so but often pushed it to 12:00 or 1:00 (mind you in college I tried to get to bed by 4 AM as a rule - I like night). I wake up before her even some mornings, and we have a couple hours of daddy-daughter time. We even watched the sun rise in winter; it's nice. But before her I HATED getting up early.

blakesterz 8y ago
It's really hard to explain to people just how effing brutal it can be for the first several years. Sleep is so random and uneven, it can really break a parent. I have a theory that people have evolved to forget just how bad the first years are, and that's the only reason people have more than one kid, because if we did really remember it all, we'd have all have serious Post Baby Trauma Disorder and no one would ever have more than one kid. You're right, it's just effing brutal.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Having two kids was the worst. Twice as many, still a noob parent. Poor kids, poor mum and dad. I mean we were nice to them but always exhausted. Was lucky. Got some good advice. Listened to it. Kids and parents are more happy now. We now have more than three and it is still way less stressful.
  - mkoivuni 8y ago
    What was the advice?
    - 8y ago

nfRfqX5n 8y ago

the idea of catching up never made sense to me because the damage is already done. you already suffered the effects from lack of sleep.

AltmousGadfly 8y ago

I don't care what the study says. I'm not going to stop trying.

rvn1045 8y ago

A good way to test wheather you’ve gotten enough sleep is to play a game of online chess. I make way more mistakes when I’ve slept less than optimal amounts.

b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago

WashPo... Yeah, no thanks.

aasasd 8y ago

ITT: “my feelings say otherwise.”

ekimekim 8y ago
Also ITT: "I have no problems with this, so if you do it's obviously your fault."

roland35 8y ago

I currently have a newborn and I know this too well from experience! I can get a few extra hours on weekends but it definitely does not help once the work week starts again. One advantage of the extra time is that I finally have beaten my favorite game FTL with every ship! With our first baby I read through all the Game of Thrones books (I was hoping book 6 would be out by the time this kid was born!!)

IOT_Apprentice 8y ago

It may be a lie, but sleeping in till 10am and waking up peacefully is a wonderful feeling.

gambler 8y ago

Maybe catch-up sleep doesn't work to fully repair the damage if you're totally wrecking your body during workdays, but it definitely helps if you're on the borderline. I usually sleep more on the weekends. If I don't, I usually start to manifest cold-like symptoms, indicating that my immune system is struggling. To me, this suggest that catch-up sleep definitely helps in some regards. I can't speak about long-term effects, but I don't think having a malfunctioning immune system would be good for me in the long run either. This is one of those cases where the effect is so clearly pronounced, I utterly don't care what "the medical science" says on the subject. Maybe it's different for different people. (I generally do get 6-7 hours of sleep on any day, though. No idea how people sleep less than 6 hours a day without collapsing at the end of the week.)

Folcon 8y ago

Are there any good suggestions for what to do if "just get more sleep" isn't really working? These sort of articles really frustrate me, their suggestions always feel fairly weak. I have difficulties falling asleep and a little bit of apnea and getting a grip on how to get consistent "gold standard" sleep is really frustrating. I've tried forcing myself to sleep early using sleep meds, which doesn't really seem to work well or be a really good long term solution. Cutting coffee and/or alcohol for periods which doesn't seem to have any significant effects. Irritatingly the most successful solution I found for a period was movement, as in someone driving me in a car on a long drive, I'd fall asleep in seconds into a deep sleep. Except that doesn't seem to happen on a train or taxi (not sure why yet), and it would be problematic working out how to do that routinely.

rhacker 8y ago

I don't know about "weekend" catch-up sleep being different than other kinds of catch up sleep, but I just had a session where I pretty much got 1 hour of sleep in a 24 hour period. The following day I slept 10 hours. Now I know that's not exactly catch up, but I hardly ever sleep more than 7. It's hard for me to sleep more than 7. So if catch up is a lie, why is the only time I am able to sleep 10 if I had a missed day?

hhjinks 8y ago
Catching up on sleep is usually said in the context of "I'll sleep more in the weekend to counteract the negative effects of sleeping 4 hours a night during the week". That is not how it works, since catchup sleep won't really do anything to reverse the effects of prolonged lack of sleep. You certainly will sleep longer when more tired, but it will not counteract the long term negative effects of sleeping too little.

JTbane 8y ago

The problem is the 8 hour workday for me. Getting ready for work takes an hour, commute is at least an hour by train each way, so getting enough sleep is tough.

manigandham 8y ago

Great JRE podcast episode with Matthew Walker (Professor of Neuroscience, Founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig

throwaway-1283 8y ago

going low carb (+ no sugar), cutting alcohol helped me naturally wake up more refreshed with less than 7 hrs sleep...

ElijahLynn 8y ago

This title is untrue according to research done by Dr. William Dement at Stanford. In his book Promise of Sleep he says they did a study where people were put in a room at an earlier than bedtime time, no electronics or devices or lights. They ended up sleeping 1-2 hours longer (closer to 10 hours) for a week and then it started to reach normal levels (closer to 8 hours) over the second week. The premise of the book Promise of Sleep is "Sleep Debt" and they proved you can pay back Sleep Debt up to about 1-2 weeks worth and the rest is absorbed by the body.

ElijahLynn 8y ago
From the WP article "While weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of insufficient sleep..." so here they are admitting there are some benefits from catching up on sleep debt, which is incompatible with the title that it is a lie. They then go on to "...those gains were wiped out when people plunged right back into their same sleep-deprived schedule the next Monday.", which again is incompatible with the title because they are saying that there is benefit but most just kill the benefit, so weekend sleep catch-up is not a lie, but Carolyn Y. Johnson (or their Editor in Chief) are lying with the title. That title is click-bait for sure.

Gpetrium 8y ago

I think that the real answer is that we do not know the answer yet. It is likely that both aspects are correct to some degree, I'll explain my take as of now: There is a real cost to sleeping less or sleeping too much and that some will feel the impact more than others also depending on the environment they are in (e.g increased stress, etc). Depending on the combined variables in conjunction to lack of sleep, some may see positive gains by 'catching-up' on the weekend (think of parents for example), although it is likely that a marginal amount of lack of sleep will continue to accumulate over longer periods of time. This in turn can potentially lead to increased risk of heart attack and other issues. The lack of sleep scenario can be seeing a little with the same lens as smoking, results can vary from person to person, but on average, it has a real negative impact when done often or under unfavorable circumstances.

bksenior 8y ago
I bet it's much simpler than that. Just like oxytocin amount, being prone to cancer and everything else there is probably large genetic predisposition and response. I bet the range range is enormous as to how sleep affects people.

thisisweirdok 8y ago

I think catch-up sleep is just an excuse we grant ourselves for sleeping more on the weekends... we've been conditioned to feel bad for not feeling productive, so we need to grant ourselves special permission.

k__ 8y ago

I stopped setting an alarm and sleep 9h a day now. Don't know if this is good or bad.

alexozer 8y ago

Blue light blocking glasses have had such a tremendously positive effect on my sleep habits (earlier bedtime, better sleep quality) that at this point I genuinely feel bad for people who don't use them. I got a pair that claims to block a very large amount of blue light (at the expense of a distinct orange tint), and just wear them after it gets dark. It makes sense that they work; your brain uses blue light to time the release of melatonin and such, and our ancestors were only exposed to non-blue light from sitting besides the campfire socializing after the sun went down. Wearing these allows me to experience much less of a consequence for using a computer at night which I simply cannot get myself to avoid.