Often times, our schedules require us to lose sleep, and in response we figure that we can simply get more sleep on the weekends to make up for it. A small study suggests our idea of “catching up” on sleep doesn’t really work for our brains.
Researchers from Penn State, University of Crete, and the University of Athens and the New York School Medicine, all teamed up and produced results indicating that sleeping in on the weekends doesn’t seem to improve the performance of your brain.
Their study included 30 healthy men and women (average age 24), who spent 13 nights in a sleep lab as researchers keep an eye on their levels of inflammatory and stress hormones, as well as their sleepiness levels during the day. The participants also took tests to test their brain function. For 4 nights, the participants slept a regular night’s sleep of 8 hours, then the next 6 nights they got only 6 hours sleep. Next, they had the last 3 nights to recover by oversleeping, getting 10 hours of sleep.
Although inflammatory and stress hormone levels increased during the sleep-deprivation nights, they went back to normal levels during the oversleeping period. This cannot be said for brain functioning, it did not get better with the extra sleep. “Sleep debt” can’t be repaid in one weekend; it takes time for the body to readjust with a long term, consistent effort.
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