In an ideal world, we would all get eight hours sleep every night and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to conquer the world.
But, unfortunately, that just isn’t the reality.
Stressful jobs, college work and family stresses can often eat away at our sleeping time, leaving us feeling like cast members of The Walking Dead the following morning.
So often when the weekend arrives, we think we can catch up on all of the sleep that we lost by snoozing until the afternoon.
And, according to Business Insider, trying to erase your lack of sleep mid-week by overdosing in it at the weekend isn’t very good for our body.Â
Sleep scientist Matthew Walker said: “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate a debt and pay it off at a later point in time.”
“If I were to deprive you of sleep an entire night, and then in a subsequent night give you all the sleep you want, you never get back all that you’ve lost.”
He added: “You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment. The brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep.”
But don’t worry, because a new study published in the Journal of Sleep contradicts that belief, revealing that you might be able to make up for lost sleep with the odd lie-in.
The study looked at the sleeping habits and overall health of 43,000 people.
The results revealed that people who slept under five hours each night, or more than eight hours a night, had much higher mortality rates than those who slept more.
In general, it was the average amount of sleep somebody got that actually made a difference.
Biological psychology professor, and lead author of the study, Torbjörn Åkerstedt said this shows that if you suffer from bad sleep over the week, and make up for it at the weekend, you could actually be doing your body a favour.
He added: “It seems like you actually can compensate by catching up on sleep during weekends.”
“This is in effect an argument for lazing around all weekend. There probably is an upper limit, but it’s anyway better to increase [sleep hours] on the weekend rather than not doing it at all.”
Sounds good to us – anything to have an extra hour (or five) in bed…
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