Can You Really Catch Up on Sleep?

Good news, fellow weekend sleep-in-ers: recent research shows that 'catching up' on sleep on your off days can help you stay healthy. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here good news for people who use their
days off as they are intended to rest up after
a busy week. It turns out those compensatory zas are
far more beneficial than previously thought, according to a Swedish
study published in in April issue of the Journal of

(00:24):
Sleep Research. The study looked at more than forty three
thousand people who participated in the Swedish National March cohort,
which began in follow up for every subject continued until
they died, moved away, or December, when the study officially closed.
The researchers for the sleep study pulled relevant data from

(00:44):
the cohort questionnaire about basic sleep habits, like how many
hours approximately participants sleep on a workday night, as well
as how many hours they snooze per night on days
off of work. Response increments ranged from less than five
hours to greater than nine hours. Previous studies have shown
that people who consistently sleep too little short sleep is
defined as five hours or less a night, or too

(01:06):
much long sleep is nine or more hours per night,
have higher mortality rates than people who fall into the
Goldilocks zone in between getting just the right amount of
sleep every night. However, the authors of the study point
out that few, if any, of those studies have asked
participants to differentiate between week day and weekend sleep, which

(01:26):
makes a big difference, they wrote, in the current study,
because there are five week days and two weekend days,
it is likely that self reports of typical sleep duration
more strongly reflect weekday sleep. Thus, it is of interest
to investigate the relationship between weekend sleep duration and mortality,
as well as the different patterns of sleep duration between

(01:47):
week day and weekend sleep. When the researchers looked at
all of the data, findings were consistent with previous conclusions
of increased mortality if both week day and weekend sleep
are short or when both are long. However, they wrote,
when weekend sleep is extended after short weekday sleep, no
association with mortality is seen. We suggest that this may

(02:10):
reflect positive effects of compensatory sleep. Experts have long advised
people to get up at the same time each day,
even on weekends, as a long term strategy for getting
better sleep each night. The theory is that yo yoing
sleep habits disturb your circadian rhythms. Dr David Ding's was
not involved in this sleep study, but he's the chief

(02:30):
of the Division of Sleep in Chronobiology at the University
of Pennsylvania Perlman School of Medicine. He told Time Magazine,
the real question is whether there is in fact a
build up of deficit or biological changes that are gradual
over time, even though you get recovery sleep. So while
this study is great news for those of us who
like to sleep in on days off, many sleep experts

(02:53):
say more studies need to be done on this subject.
Today's episode was written by Alia Hoyt and produced by
Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other
topics that may or may not reinforce your current habits,
visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.