3 ms·

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: Slee

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.