If you regularly lose sleep or choose to sleep less than needed, the sleep loss adds up. The total sleep lost is called your sleep debt. For example, if you lose 2 hours of sleep each night, you'll have a sleep debt of 14 hours after a week. Some people nap to deal with sleepiness.
Sleep debt, also known as sleep deficit, is the difference between how much sleep you need and how much you actually get. When you sleep fewer hours than your body needs, you have a sleep debt. This “debt” adds up over time and can negatively impact your health.
If you have built up sleep debt, allow extra time for sleep: go to bed early. You sleep more deeply when you are sleep deprived, so you do not need to “pay back” hour for hour the lost sleep. However, if you have not had enough sleep for many days, it might take several nights of good-quality sleep to recover.
How Is Sleep Debt Calculated? One way to calculate your sleep debt is to track the nights you're getting less than 7 hours of sleep. Then add up how much less sleep you got every day. So if you're only getting 6 hours of sleep Monday through Friday, by the weekend you've built up a debt of 5 hours.
Signs of Sleep Debt
The symptoms of sleep debt are often the same as the ones for sleep deprivation — you're likely to feel sleepy, have low motivation, trouble learning, mood swings, and more.
While both napping and sleeping in on weekends may help ease symptoms like fatigue or daytime sleepiness, they are often not enough to adequately recover from sleep debt. The accumulating effects of sleep loss is a debt that takes longer to repay.
But new research suggests that you actually can make up at least some of your sleep debt by getting more shut eye on weekends. But that doesn't mean it's a fool-proof plan. Sometimes, people who try to “pay back” their sleep debt on the weekend oversleep — and that's not healthy either.
Regularly getting too little sleep is linked to a number of chronic diseases, not to mention irritability and sluggishness during the day. But did you know that sleeping too much could also be problematic? Oversleeping is associated with many health problems, including: Type 2 diabetes.
In addition to burning calories and regulating your metabolism, sleep also helps regulate your heart rate and sugar levels. Only getting 3 hours of sleep for a prolonged time can lead to increased inflammation, elevated blood pressure and a higher resting heart rate.
Most of the first few hours of sleep can be recovered, but if the amount of sleep lost is more than a few hours, not all of it will be recovered.” Dr. Smith says that if you lose only five hours of sleep throughout the week, you can probably recover most of the five hours over the weekend.
Yes. Lack of sleep can affect your immune system. Studies show that people who don't get quality sleep or enough sleep are more likely to get sick after being exposed to a virus, such as a common cold virus. Lack of sleep also can affect how fast you get better if you do get sick.
Dr. Winter says that as much as you may try to force yourself to stay awake, eventually your brain gets fixated on sleep and "at a certain point there's not much you can do about it." That's a good thing—you really don't want to go without sleep.
The third and fourth stages are deep sleep. Though REM sleep was previously believed to be the most important sleep phase for learning and memory, newer data suggests that non-REM sleep is more important for these tasks, as well as being the more restful and restorative phase of sleep.
If you are running on long-term sleep debt, he suggests that the first step is committing to getting as much rest as you need until your body is fully replenished. This might be more than just a couple of hours on the weekends, it may take a few weeks of extensive rest until you feel fully recovered.
The Drawbacks
Another challenge of a reverse sleep schedule is that it can disrupt our circadian rhythms or the body's internal clock. Our bodies are designed to be awake during the day and asleep at night, and disrupting this rhythm can have negative effects on our physical and mental health.
But in general, the term refers to short naps ranging from about 10 to 30 minutes. A power nap that lasts 20 to 30 minutes is usually ideal. It's long enough to give you all the benefits of sleep without leaving you feeling groggy when you wake up.
Warm milk is a popular home remedy for better sleep, but does it work? Studies show that drinking milk before bed may promote relaxation and better sleep. Researchers believe the tryptophan and melatonin in milk may contribute to quality sleep. A soothing nighttime routine may also help.
The ideal nap length is either a short power nap (20-minute nap) or up to 90 minutes. A two-hour nap may leave you feeling groggy and hamper your normal sleep cycle. Generally, you want to nap for less than an hour and take it earlier in the day (such as before 2 or 3 p.m.).