so like if you pull an all-nighter and then over the next few days catch a few hours-long naps in addition to regular sleep, is your body left the same as if it never lost sleep initially?
No cite, but no. There’s no point in sleeping extra - although it might of course be gratifying, that much is true.
I’ve heard this but it sounds like an urban legend. Of course you can catch up at some point in time. Are you saying that if I pulled an all nighter at age 19, then when I am 57 years old, some part of me is still suffering the ill-effects?
It’s not like we need some fixed amount of sleep - therefore we don’t really need to catch up. But if we sleep too little, it has some effect on our health. It’s a strain to the body and source of stress. Sleeping more later won’t automatically void these effects - what’s done, is done.
On the other hand, resting well is certainly good for you, so in some sense it would be like “catching up”, diminishing effects of stress and improving health and wellbeing. Although it’s rather quality over quantity thing, and number of hours of sleep isn’t as important as sleeping well. To a degree, our bodies can cope quite well with not enough sleep, doing things like shortening cycles of sleep or doing more REM.
Is it “the same” as if you never lost sleep? No. But it’s like fasting. Your body isn’t “the same” a few days after having not eaten, but it’s not wildly different, either. Also, there most definitely is a point to sleeping extra. However, it’s not simple, like filling the gas tank after using some gas. Just like with fasting, you don’t need another 2500 calories per day of fasting once the fast is over (which also wouldn’t “replenish what was lost”), and you don’t need another 8 hours per night of sleep missed. The body uses “something else” to make up for the lost sleep. What this something else is is up to debate.
I personally don’t like sleep. I never really felt very good after sleeping (though, admittedly, it’s always significantly better than the alternative), and I don’t like the idea of spending valuable hours in my life doing something completely unproductive and that I don’t even get enjoyment out of. So I have run a few sleep deprivation experiments on myself and read up on the elderly, mystics, sleep anea sufferers, etc. (people who seem to get by with less sleep).
I used to be a terrible sleeper. I only felt “good” with 10+ hours of sleep (I averaged between 9 and 10), and it usually took me more than half an hour to fall asleep in the first place (sometimes far longer). After reading as much as I did about sleep (and trying various other things), I experimented with getting exactly 6 hours of sleep (and during the exact same hours every day) for 3 months solid. During this time, I observed several effects:
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The first 2 weeks was hell. I was constantly tired and irritable and grew to absolutely despise my alarm clock. I probably annoyed family and friends with my irritability. I do not recall how my work output was affected, but I presume it was also negative.
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After the first 2 weeks, it became gradually easier. After some amount of time (approximately 4 weeks), I no longer felt like I was low on sleep at all (which, you’ll note, is entirely subjective. I may well still have been “low” on something, and my judgement and “irritability” may still have been affected).
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Starting at about 1 week from the start of the test, and continuing until today, approximately 12 years later, I no longer have any trouble falling asleep. It is very often less than 1 minute, sometimes practically instantaneous. Admittedly, this can cause problems when one’s wife wishes to discuss the day.
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At the end of the 3 month test, I turned off my alarm. I continued sleeping for 6 hours a night with no outside stimulous. This lasted for approximately 2 weeks, whereupon my awakening time gradually got later until averaging around 8 hours. My feeling of “having enough sleep” stayed fairly consistent regardless of how many hours was slept.
Based on the results of this experiment, I have since tried stints of 4 hours a night for several weeks. This has met with more difficulty, though it was also undertaken with less scientific rigor (ie, I cheated occasionally, had different sleeping times and arrangements, etc). Still, the effects were similar. I now usually feel quite good when I arise no matter how little sleep I’ve gotten. In fact, it’s often the reverse – this morning I slept 8 hours and felt awful. I’m definitely still affected when I sleep very little, but the effects are much smaller than they used to be.
I have definite opinions about how much sleep is “necessary” now, but aside from what little I was unable to keep out of the text above, I’ll table them in deference to this being a GQ topic.
You may need more sleep, but it isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between hours-lost and hours-to-catch up. Randy Gardner holds the world record in sleep deprivation. He stayed awake for 264 hours and 12 minutes. When he finally went to sleep, he slept only 14 hours and 40 minutes and woke up essentially recovered. While that’s an unusually long amount of time to sleep in one go, it adds up to less than two hours of sleep per night.
I don’t know the scientific answer, but I go through work phases where I don’t get enough sleep. Because I get up early and then have occasional 12-hour days followed by getting up early again, I feel, at least, like I get more and more “behind.” By the time my “off” weekend rolls around (where I only get up early and work for a few hours instead of 12) I’m overtired and I tend to sleep. A lot. Like off and on all day on Saturday, and a bit less on Sunday. By Monday morning, I feel recovered enough to start the whole cycle again.
I’ve been doing this for so long that I find it hard to sleep for more than 5 or 6 hours–when I wake up after longer, I’m achy and sore all over. When I do sleep, though, I sleep hard–I think I don’t move around enough, and that contributes to the soreness.
Best,
karol
People vary willdy on this. My mother always proclaimed that you can’t catch up on sleep. That is complete shit and I know that I have read scientific articles that say the same although I don’t remember enough to give a cite.
I have an odd talent of staying up for extremely long periods and sleeping for very long periods. During my senior year of college, I stayed up for 75 hours straight for finals and aced every single exam. However, I went to a party after it was done and disappeared some time around midnight. I woke up about 7 miles away in a place that I had never been before completely covered in mud. It took me a day to remember what had happened but I finally figured out that I was fighting in a desperate place in Vietnam trying to make it back to friendly territory. Sure enough, in a back corner of the apartment where the party was, there was a primitive fox-hole I managed to dig with my hands. Thankfully, I was never captured as a prisoner of war. I slept for 24 hours straight after a shower the next morning after I made it back into friendly territory that was the apartment.
Three years ago, I went to sleep late Friday night and woke up Sunday night. I only woke up to drink some water and pee but I barely remember it. I have had multiple episodes of sleeping 16 to 24 plus hours at a time.
Sleep, like eating and drinking, is a homeostatic process. This means that your body requires a specific amount of sleep each night, and if you don’t get that amount of sleep you feel tired (aka, sleep pressure). Likewise, once you do sleep again, you sleep more than you usually would (aka, sleep rebound).
All the research out there has shown that while people, and other animals, show sleep rebound following sleep deprivation, you never completely make up all the sleep you lost. In the long term, however, this does not cause any lasting harm. Not to say that you should make a regular practice of depriving yourself of sleep. That way lies madness.
Della, Ph.D. in sleep development.
It’s not as if missing 8 hours of sleep one night will require you to sleep for 16 the next night to catch up. But you might sleep for 10 or 11, allowing your body a little extra time to recover from the stress you placed on it by forgoing a night’s sleep.
If I can hijack slightly while there’s a real sleep expert around, why do I feel so tired when I oversleep? When I get beween 6 1/2 and 8 hours of sleep, I feel pretty good the next day. But if I sleep for 10 or 11 hours, I spend the next day groggy and sluggish, then go to bed early again! What’s up?
It has to do with what stage of sleep you wake up during. Humans progress through multiple stage of sleep during the night. They can be roughly categorized as light sleep (NREM stages 1-2), deep sleep (NREM stages 3-4), and dream sleep (REM). Although people (as well as other mammals) cycle through these sleep stages throughout the night, they are not evenly distributed. Specifically, NREM sleep dominates the first part of the night, and REM sleep dominates the last part of the night. Furthermore, humans (and other mammals) tend to naturally wake up immediately following a REM episode. If, however, you are woken up during a NREM episode you may feel groggy.
Actually, this is similar to what happens when you take a nap in the afternoon. If you just lay down for a few minutes you’re fine, but if you fall asleep for more than 90 minutes or so, oftentimes you feel worse than when you started. That’s, again, due to waking up during weird stages of sleep.
My favorite napping anecdote is about Thomas Edison. He famously didn’t require much sleep, and in fact hated sleeping. On those occasions when he did require a nap he sat in a chair, holding a steel ball bearing over a cooking kettle. As he fell asleep, his muscle tone decreased and his grip on the ball bearing loosened. Once he entered REM sleep (losing all muscle tone) the ball bearing fell, clanged against the kettle, and woke him up. Thus, he got just enough sleep and felt none the worse for wear.
Standard disclaimers apply: human sleep research is messy, unruly, untidy, and confusing. I can’t tell you a damn thing about dreams. While I did study sleep, I did it in baby rats, so unless you’re an infant rodent I probably can’t help you with your problem.
Can you explain this better for me? Does your lack of sleep then accumulate? What does it mean to not have completely made up for lost sleep?
WoodenTaco said it pretty well upthread. Here’s another example of what I mean.
Say you normally sleep for 8 hours a night. During finals week you pull an all-nighter, resulting in a sleep deficit of 8 hours. The next night (after only doing ok on your test since you were sleep deprived) you sleep for 12 hours, which is your normal 8 hours sleep, plus 4 hours of rebound sleep. This cuts your sleep deficit to 4 hours. The next night, you sleep for 10 hours, which is your normal 8 hours sleep, plus 2 hours of rebound sleep, and this cuts your sleep deficit to 2 hours. The next night you sleep for your normal 8 hours.
So, out of the original missed 8 hours of sleep, you have only made up for 6 of them. Physiologically, will you suffer any ill-effects for not completely making up for all of your lost sleep? Not likely, unless you make a habit of it.
However, that may be easier said than done. Our society is chronically sleep deprived, and it may be adversely effecting our health in a myriad of tiny ways. This, unfortunately, is not likely to change any time soon, thanks to Late Late shows and early commutes.
Hope this cleared things up a little.
Not for me. The whole “never make up the sleep” concept has been out there, but it doesn’t make sense. After pulling that all nighter, if this person gets 8 full hours of sleep each night thereafter, at some point they must have put that one bad night behind them. We can’t keep saying that they are 2 hours behind in sleep, that they “never” make up those last two hours.
I think the often used phrase “sleep debt” has complicated our views about this. Having a debt implies that we need to pay it back, but I don’t think it really works that way. It’s more like the National Debt. Let somebody else worry about it.
I’m guessing unspun is as unimpressed by these answers as I am. I don’t see study cites, just common sense. And common sense, as can be seen above is not very uniform.
Ask and ye shall receive.
First, on whether sleep debt exists, and whethere it has long-term effects: almost certainly.
The Cumulative Cost of Additional Wakefulness: Dose-Response Effects on Neurobehavioral Functions and Sleep Physiology From Chronic Sleep Restriction and Total Sleep Deprivation(Sleep, 2003)
Chronic restriction of sleep periods to 4 h or 6 h per night over 14 consecutive days resulted in significant cumulative, dose-dependent deficits in cognitive performance on all tasks… A statistical model revealed that, regardless of the mode of sleep deprivation, lapses in behavioral alertness were near-linearly related to the cumulative duration of wakefulness in excess of 15.84 h… This suggests that sleep debt is perhaps best understood as resulting in additional wakefulness that has a neurobiological “cost” which accumulates over time.
Second, whether recovery sleep exists: Probably, since you sleep significantly differently after a sleep debt has been accrued. In a way, you sleep more intensely:
Recovery Sleep At Different Times Of The Night Following Loss Of The Last Four Hours Of Sleep (Sleep, 1985)
After 1 night of restricted sleep… recovery sleep… exhibits elevated REM and stage 2 levels when allowed to continue beyond a normal sleep length. After 3-7 nights of restricted sleep, the amount of stage 4 sleep significantly increases above baseline levels, with a sharp increase in REM after the first 6h of recovery sleep.
There are gazillions more studies out there with similar findings. There is still a significant debate on how harmful sleep debt is, but there isn’t much of one on whether it exists at all. Searching for the keywords “sleep debt” and “recovery sleep” yields good results.
Not really. A common misconception, since people who build a sleep deficit tend to report no unusual sleepiness in self-report surveys, but they show significantly worse cognitive performance as they rack up debt. Sleep debts also causes similar physiological changes to those that occur with aging (cite: Impact of sleep debt on metabolic and endocrine function. Lancet, 1999)