Sorry folks: even though sleeping later on the weekends feels good, it doesn’t help you catch up on sleep you’ve lost during the week. In fact, it can actually make you even sleepier next week.
Photo by Zhao !
Many of us think that if we missed sleep during the week we can make up for those hours by sleeping in the same amount on Saturday and Sunday. Dr Gregory Carter, a sleep medicine specialist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical centre, says that’s a bad idea.
When we sleep in on weekends, we delay our brain’s circadian clock by up to two hours, messing up our internal clock. This makes for very painful Monday wake-ups.
Instead, if you want to balance any “sleep debt”, go to sleep earlier on the weekends and get a full eight hours of rest, rather than sleeping in later. This might not be what you want to hear, but if you struggle with grogginess on Monday mornings, it’s best not to mess with your sleep cycles.
With planning, ‘you snooze, you lose’ no longer applies to work week’s sleep debt [UT Southwestern Medical centre via The Telegraph via NextDraft]
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