5 ms·

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 purpos

by 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?
        rbty 8y ago
        And remember that spinach has a lot of iron, butter is good for you in 1940, bad for you in 1970, good for you in 2010. Margarine is good for you in 1970, bad for you in 2010. Good luck.
        svat 8y ago
        Self-reported statements (about how someone feels) are good evidence for how they feel. In your example, if the claim is that your friend believes he is not drunk, then his experience still carries more weight (is a more reliable indicator of his beliefs) than most studies. This is different from the question of whether he is actually sober, of course. But the post you're replying to is specifically about the claim that X person feels better, not about any physical effects on their body. I'd rather trust a person about how they say they feel (especially at a given moment), than studies trying to determine how most people probably feel or ought to feel in a similar situation.
    - baddox 8y ago
      Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence? It seems to me like self-reported feelings are great evidence, and need particularly strong evidence (e.g. evidence of long-term damage that isn’t felt in the short term, like for smoking cigarettes) to contradict.
      - judofyr 8y ago
        > Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence? Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal. It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires. I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
      - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        Because we're really good at fooling ourselves, and we lie to present an idealised version of ourselves. Example: [Apparently] having coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, it's that caffeine dependency (and maybe a little dehydration) makes you feel terrible. Coffee temporarily reverse this negative [local maxima]. Coffee appears to wake you up, but it's doing the opposite. There are many common examples - 'drinking doesn't affect my driving', 'I don't drink heavily', 'advertising doesn't affect me', 'I get enough exercise', 'my diet is healthy', 'I go to church regularly'. Reports here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7.85124 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7...., for example, have measured overreporting of exercise/church attendance at double.
    - dasanman 8y ago
      In the ends its about how you feel, your well being. Right?
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      Except a lot of studies and protocols do rely on self-assessment of conditions. Pain scores, Depression scores are the ones I remember right now So yes, it is something that's used because you don't have a way of directly measuring all things
  - krageon 8y ago
    The important thing to keep in mind there is that it doesn't much matter what the science tells you: It makes you feel better and it costs you almost nothing. That makes it a valuable pursuit even if we couldn't find evidence for it working (though another post in this chain mentions some evidence that it does work for a single week).
    - erik_seaberg 8y ago
      When sleeping more shortens my waking life, I really want to know how important it is.
      - krageon 8y ago
        If your waking life feels like shit when you don't sleep an hour more, I don't know what more incentive you need to sleep an hour more (given that you are free to do so).
      - Simon_says 8y ago
        That's a very important question that should be answered, but your implicit assumption that sleeping shortens waking life should at least be verified. It looks like chronic lack of sleep shortens life expectancy.
  - diminoten 8y ago
    No, because it's not predictive. Thousands of things could cause that feeling, there's no telling it's the catch up sleep. The point is you can't do anything with his anecdote. It gives you no more information about what you should do, and is therefore technically useless.
- SenHeng 8y ago
  It feels that way but only temporarily. When I keep repeating it not sleeping, my weekend is spent only sleeping and my weekday performance begins to drop, eventually I need to sleep in even on week days. Only way I've managed to recover is to take an entire month off, sleep as much as I want for the first week (or two) and slowly try to shift back into an 8 hour cycle.
- listenallyall 8y ago
  His experience is perfectly in line with the results of the study: > weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of insufficient sleep Just like 'ferros' described, if you have a single occasional week of limited sleep, making it up on the weekends DOES have benefits. The problem starts when you repeatedly sleep an inadequate number of hours during the week.
  - lagadu 8y ago
    I think that description is upside down: being sleep deprived during the week causes a large number of problems and sleeping extra on weekends doesn't have benefits, rather it mitigates some of the problems caused by the sleep deprivation. You don't get any benefits over someone who sleeps all they need during the week.
- baddox 8y ago
  Sure, if there are some long-term negative effects, then I’d like to see them. But this article doesn’t claim or show that. So if that commenter feels like the weekend catchup works, then I would say that it does in fact work, by definition.
- strken 8y ago
  The "science" in the linked WaPo article, and the science from the journal, weakly indicate that if you get 5 hours of sleep each night for an entire work week you will get fat, and sleeping in for an extra hour on the weekend won't stop you getting even more fat when you do the same thing on Monday and Tuesday. This has almost nothing to do with what ferros said. No, resting on the weekend won't uneat or burn the extra calories, in the same way that it won't rewrite all your bad code or help your fuzzy memory, but it could very well help you perform at a more normal level the next week.
  - CannisterFlux 8y ago
    How does sleeping less make you fat? Eating more will make you fat, eating less will make you less fat. If you sleep less you have more time to eat more, but that still requires the eating to happen.
    - torstenvl 8y ago
      "Calories in" is only part of the equation. Sleep metabolism is different from waking metabolism. Also, to your point, very few people spend their sleeping hours eating. You could eat 1500 calories for every meal and be very lithe - if you slept 23 hours a day. By contrast, it seems anecdotally that people who get less sleep tend to eat more food and more of it is unhealthy: late night Taco Bell, delivery when you're pulling an all-nighter, etc. Best diet pill on the market? Unisom.
      - yaseer 8y ago
        > You could eat 1500 calories for every meal and be very lithe - if you slept 23 hours a day. Not sure if this statement is sound, for the average person. If you ate 4500 per day, spread across 3, 20 minute meals, and spent the remaining 23 hours sleeping... your energy expenditure would be minimal, whilst your energy intake large. The average person would gain weight rapidly. (300lb athletes perhaps not, but these are outliers).
    - jm__87 8y ago
      From my understanding on this topic, the problem has more to do with insulin sensitivity. It has been measured that insulin sensitivity is worse the day after a poor night's sleep and insulin resistance can help drive fat accumulation, all other things being equal.
freddie_mercury 8y ago
To push back some, how do you see your statement as different from post-modernist ("subjectivism is all that matters") or anti-intellectualist ("I don't care what science has to say") arguments in other subjects?
- welly 8y ago
  Surely in this example, it doesn't matter what science concludes. If the OP feels better after a weekend of sleep, then simply they feel better? Science can't demand that they're either lying or disillusioned. I say this as someone who has a strong belief in science.
  - sarbaz 8y ago
    This person's feelings are evidence that good science should be able to explain. Dismissing them just because they don't line up with our theory is precisely what anti-intellectualism is all about.
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    I guess I was more talking about how the default reaction wasn't "hmm, maybe this new science should cause me to reevaluate my priors". Instead it was to, within seconds/minutes, post about how this new scientific finding doesn't apply to them and they don't need to change any existing beliefs or behavior. Surely our default reaction should be to deeply question our existing beliefs when disconfirming evidence comes up?
    - cscurmudgeon 8y ago
      Our default reaction should be to watch out for shoddy science and shoddy scientific journalism.
- baddox 8y ago
  Seems to me like subjectivism is fine when you’re only talking about one subject: yourself.
Hattes 8y ago
This is my experience as well. When I don't sleep, I feel terrible. If I sleep a long while in the weekend I might have low energy but that feeling of oppressive nausea goes away.
diftraku 8y ago
Can comp this. I tend to sleep very badly during the week at times and Saturday is a catch-up day for me, when I usually sleep well into the afternoon. Having a chance to "reset" during the weekend helps me more mentally than it might help physically. Deep sleep has been described to work as a scrubber of sorts, so longer periods of deep sleep should help with scrubbing all that mental cruft away. Plus just being able to relax goes a long way, knowing you have to be somewhere by certain time always puts some weight on you that can negatively impact your sleep.
clooless 8y ago
Yes. I need 7.5 hours/night to have sufficient energy to be productive, but usually get 6.5-7. I sleep extra hours over the weekend and this resets me back to where I need to be feeling. Sundays are amazing. It's true that what I feel doesn't count towards proving a scientific fact for other people, but I don't see why it can't prove it for myself. After all, people's bodies occupy a broad continuum when it comes to how they operate, and scientific studies generally stipulate that their conclusions aren't true for everyone.
arandr0x 8y ago
I've spent significant stretches of my life sleeping 4.5-6 hours/night on weeknights, and then 8-10 hours on weekends. It works just fine. I do drink a ton of coffee, but I'm quite alert even before my first one at 9AM, and capable of doing exercise/engaging in focused activity with zero difficulty. If I don't sleep enough on weekends though (like I have to set the alarm) I start getting jumpy and anxious though.

by 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?
      - rbty 8y ago
        And remember that spinach has a lot of iron, butter is good for you in 1940, bad for you in 1970, good for you in 2010. Margarine is good for you in 1970, bad for you in 2010. Good luck.
      - svat 8y ago
        Self-reported statements (about how someone feels) are good evidence for how they feel. In your example, if the claim is that your friend believes he is not drunk, then his experience still carries more weight (is a more reliable indicator of his beliefs) than most studies. This is different from the question of whether he is actually sober, of course. But the post you're replying to is specifically about the claim that X person feels better, not about any physical effects on their body. I'd rather trust a person about how they say they feel (especially at a given moment), than studies trying to determine how most people probably feel or ought to feel in a similar situation.
  - baddox 8y ago
    Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence? It seems to me like self-reported feelings are great evidence, and need particularly strong evidence (e.g. evidence of long-term damage that isn’t felt in the short term, like for smoking cigarettes) to contradict.
    - judofyr 8y ago
      > Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence? Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal. It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires. I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Because we're really good at fooling ourselves, and we lie to present an idealised version of ourselves. Example: [Apparently] having coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, it's that caffeine dependency (and maybe a little dehydration) makes you feel terrible. Coffee temporarily reverse this negative [local maxima]. Coffee appears to wake you up, but it's doing the opposite. There are many common examples - 'drinking doesn't affect my driving', 'I don't drink heavily', 'advertising doesn't affect me', 'I get enough exercise', 'my diet is healthy', 'I go to church regularly'. Reports here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7.85124 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7...., for example, have measured overreporting of exercise/church attendance at double.
  - dasanman 8y ago
    In the ends its about how you feel, your well being. Right?
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Except a lot of studies and protocols do rely on self-assessment of conditions. Pain scores, Depression scores are the ones I remember right now So yes, it is something that's used because you don't have a way of directly measuring all things
- krageon 8y ago
  The important thing to keep in mind there is that it doesn't much matter what the science tells you: It makes you feel better and it costs you almost nothing. That makes it a valuable pursuit even if we couldn't find evidence for it working (though another post in this chain mentions some evidence that it does work for a single week).
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    When sleeping more shortens my waking life, I really want to know how important it is.
    - krageon 8y ago
      If your waking life feels like shit when you don't sleep an hour more, I don't know what more incentive you need to sleep an hour more (given that you are free to do so).
    - Simon_says 8y ago
      That's a very important question that should be answered, but your implicit assumption that sleeping shortens waking life should at least be verified. It looks like chronic lack of sleep shortens life expectancy.
- diminoten 8y ago
  No, because it's not predictive. Thousands of things could cause that feeling, there's no telling it's the catch up sleep. The point is you can't do anything with his anecdote. It gives you no more information about what you should do, and is therefore technically useless.
SenHeng 8y ago
It feels that way but only temporarily. When I keep repeating it not sleeping, my weekend is spent only sleeping and my weekday performance begins to drop, eventually I need to sleep in even on week days. Only way I've managed to recover is to take an entire month off, sleep as much as I want for the first week (or two) and slowly try to shift back into an 8 hour cycle.
listenallyall 8y ago
His experience is perfectly in line with the results of the study: > weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of insufficient sleep Just like 'ferros' described, if you have a single occasional week of limited sleep, making it up on the weekends DOES have benefits. The problem starts when you repeatedly sleep an inadequate number of hours during the week.
- lagadu 8y ago
  I think that description is upside down: being sleep deprived during the week causes a large number of problems and sleeping extra on weekends doesn't have benefits, rather it mitigates some of the problems caused by the sleep deprivation. You don't get any benefits over someone who sleeps all they need during the week.
baddox 8y ago
Sure, if there are some long-term negative effects, then I’d like to see them. But this article doesn’t claim or show that. So if that commenter feels like the weekend catchup works, then I would say that it does in fact work, by definition.
strken 8y ago
The "science" in the linked WaPo article, and the science from the journal, weakly indicate that if you get 5 hours of sleep each night for an entire work week you will get fat, and sleeping in for an extra hour on the weekend won't stop you getting even more fat when you do the same thing on Monday and Tuesday. This has almost nothing to do with what ferros said. No, resting on the weekend won't uneat or burn the extra calories, in the same way that it won't rewrite all your bad code or help your fuzzy memory, but it could very well help you perform at a more normal level the next week.
- CannisterFlux 8y ago
  How does sleeping less make you fat? Eating more will make you fat, eating less will make you less fat. If you sleep less you have more time to eat more, but that still requires the eating to happen.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    "Calories in" is only part of the equation. Sleep metabolism is different from waking metabolism. Also, to your point, very few people spend their sleeping hours eating. You could eat 1500 calories for every meal and be very lithe - if you slept 23 hours a day. By contrast, it seems anecdotally that people who get less sleep tend to eat more food and more of it is unhealthy: late night Taco Bell, delivery when you're pulling an all-nighter, etc. Best diet pill on the market? Unisom.
    - yaseer 8y ago
      > You could eat 1500 calories for every meal and be very lithe - if you slept 23 hours a day. Not sure if this statement is sound, for the average person. If you ate 4500 per day, spread across 3, 20 minute meals, and spent the remaining 23 hours sleeping... your energy expenditure would be minimal, whilst your energy intake large. The average person would gain weight rapidly. (300lb athletes perhaps not, but these are outliers).
  - jm__87 8y ago
    From my understanding on this topic, the problem has more to do with insulin sensitivity. It has been measured that insulin sensitivity is worse the day after a poor night's sleep and insulin resistance can help drive fat accumulation, all other things being equal.

freddie_mercury 8y ago

To push back some, how do you see your statement as different from post-modernist ("subjectivism is all that matters") or anti-intellectualist ("I don't care what science has to say") arguments in other subjects?

welly 8y ago
Surely in this example, it doesn't matter what science concludes. If the OP feels better after a weekend of sleep, then simply they feel better? Science can't demand that they're either lying or disillusioned. I say this as someone who has a strong belief in science.
- sarbaz 8y ago
  This person's feelings are evidence that good science should be able to explain. Dismissing them just because they don't line up with our theory is precisely what anti-intellectualism is all about.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  I guess I was more talking about how the default reaction wasn't "hmm, maybe this new science should cause me to reevaluate my priors". Instead it was to, within seconds/minutes, post about how this new scientific finding doesn't apply to them and they don't need to change any existing beliefs or behavior. Surely our default reaction should be to deeply question our existing beliefs when disconfirming evidence comes up?
  - cscurmudgeon 8y ago
    Our default reaction should be to watch out for shoddy science and shoddy scientific journalism.
baddox 8y ago
Seems to me like subjectivism is fine when you’re only talking about one subject: yourself.

Hattes 8y ago

This is my experience as well. When I don't sleep, I feel terrible. If I sleep a long while in the weekend I might have low energy but that feeling of oppressive nausea goes away.

diftraku 8y ago

Can comp this. I tend to sleep very badly during the week at times and Saturday is a catch-up day for me, when I usually sleep well into the afternoon. Having a chance to "reset" during the weekend helps me more mentally than it might help physically. Deep sleep has been described to work as a scrubber of sorts, so longer periods of deep sleep should help with scrubbing all that mental cruft away. Plus just being able to relax goes a long way, knowing you have to be somewhere by certain time always puts some weight on you that can negatively impact your sleep.

clooless 8y ago

Yes. I need 7.5 hours/night to have sufficient energy to be productive, but usually get 6.5-7. I sleep extra hours over the weekend and this resets me back to where I need to be feeling. Sundays are amazing. It's true that what I feel doesn't count towards proving a scientific fact for other people, but I don't see why it can't prove it for myself. After all, people's bodies occupy a broad continuum when it comes to how they operate, and scientific studies generally stipulate that their conclusions aren't true for everyone.

arandr0x 8y ago

I've spent significant stretches of my life sleeping 4.5-6 hours/night on weeknights, and then 8-10 hours on weekends. It works just fine. I do drink a ton of coffee, but I'm quite alert even before my first one at 9AM, and capable of doing exercise/engaging in focused activity with zero difficulty. If I don't sleep enough on weekends though (like I have to set the alarm) I start getting jumpy and anxious though.