Help me settle this bet with my “roommate”. Assuming they both have similar sleep hygiene and biological factors, who will be more impaired:
a person who gets 8+ hours of solid sleep every night of the week except Saturdays, when they stay up all night?
or a person who consistently gets <7 hours every night, averaging the same amount of sleep debt but distributed evenly?
And why?
Also, does person 1 ‘compress’ all of the deleterious effects of their sleep deprivation into Sunday, or would they be feeling it throughout the work week like person 2?
I’ll wait for a more informed answer, but anecdotally as someone who has had issues with sleep missing one whole nights sleep feels far worse than consitently losing 2-3 hotus every night.
The reason is because they are getting good quality sleep for 6 of the 7 days. The 7th day they pull an all nighter which is not a problem if the next night they get to recover with their 8+ hour sleep. In fact, it may even be good for the body to practice this because it’s like fasting. It’s actually healthy to not eat (fast) from time to time. You shouldn’t fast all the time but fasting once in a while would be very healthy for you. Same with donating blood. It’s healthy for you to give blood once in a while, but it wouldn’t be good for you to constantly be giving blood each day.
Person 2 is lacking sleep each day and over the long run, would not be healthy for you. Doing something consistently bad for you (even if it’s just a little) is worse than doing more of it just once a week.
For people who have a particular kind of insomnia, staying up all night once in a while can keep them on a regular schedule, but once a week is too often.
These are people who have a natural sleep cycle that causes them to want to sleep for 9-11 hours a night, and then be up for 20 to 22. Such people tend to try to follow a work schedule that does not let them get 9 to 10 hours of sleep, but they still stay up all hours. By staying up all night, they can perform a “reset,” and begin going to be really early, getting up on time for work, and follow a pretty good sleep schedule for several months at a time. They usually couple it with some mild sleep inducer, such as OTC melatonin, and may have a PRN like Ambien to take if they are getting close to needing another reset, but they have to keep going because there is something due at work. Then when the weekend comes, they perform the reset, and are good for several more months.
They don’t represent all people with insomnia, though-- just a subset.
If I’ve done the math right here, a person who sleeps 8 hours every night of the week except the night they pull an all-nighter is averaging 6.86 hours of sleep per night over there whole week. That’s… actually plenty for some folks, if they get it every night.