How Can You Catch Up on Sleep?

If you try to make up for lost sleep by sleeping out after a weekend out or a busy work week with little sleep, you will find that this is ineffective. One night of insufficient sleep can usually be made up by sleeping a little longer the next night. But with several days of sleep deprivation, the deficit accumulates and sleeping out no longer helps. The only thing that helps then is going to bed earlier.

Your body makes up for lost sleep by sleeping deeper instead of longer. When sleep periods are short, the phases of deep sleep are shorter. Precisely, deep sleep is essential for physical recovery. This deep sleep occurs mainly in the first half of the night and normally occupies about 10 to 15% of total sleep time. A lack of deep sleep eventually leads to chronic fatigue, which is not solved by sleeping longer in the morning - by morning the periods of deep sleep are shorter. It is better to go to bed earlier to allow more time for deep sleep.

Large fluctuations in bedtimes, such as sleeping late on weekends, also significantly disrupt your biological clock. If you do want to sleep in, limit it to a maximum of 1.5 hours, the duration of one sleep cycle.

In addition, we don't need to make up all the lost hours. Research shows that we can only make up about one-third of missed hours.