Paying Off Sleep Debt is Harder than It Looks
Given how important sleep is to our health, it’s a shame that it’s not so easy to catch up on our lost hours of snoozing.
The authors of a 2019 study tried to empirically measure the value of catch-up sleeping. They had young healthy volunteers intentionally sleep poorly for five days, then had some volunteers get extra sleep on the weekend.
While this extra sleeping did appear to help volunteers eat lighter and better control their blood sugar, the health benefits went away as soon as they started not sleeping much again, the researchers found. If nothing else, this research seems to show that it takes more than a weekend to pay back our sleep debt.
