Science News: If the weekend is your time to catch up on sleep, you may want to rethink your strategy.
In young adults, using the weekend to make up for lost sleep during the workweek can lead to increased late-night munchies, weight gain and a lowered responsiveness to insulin, researchers report February 28 in Current Biology.
12 comments:
I've always really struggled with maintaining a healthy sleep cycle, and a lot of that for me has to do with my difficulty waking myself up in the morning when I don't have to. I sometimes find myself sleeping until noon or later on the weekends, and right up to 10 on the weekdays where my first class is at 10:30. I know that this isn't a healthy way to live, but yet I still do it anyways. I found this article intriguing to read just because it pointed out what I've already known, and provided me with actual data about why it's not good for you. I've been doing a lot better this semester at consistently going to bed at around midnight or earlier, but I'm still sleeping in too long, which actually sometimes makes me feel worse. This really motivates me to work on getting a healthier sleep schedule, but the way this school schedules us it makes it really difficult to go to bed before midnight.
I was aware that an irregular sleep pattern was not ideal, but I did not know it could be so detrimental to one’s health. I usually try to wake up at a reasonable time on weekends, often around 9:30am. This allows me to feel more relaxed, as I have more time to be productive. But this also allows me to maintain more consistency with the number of hours I sleep per night. Last semester, I had morning classes at 8:30am and 10:30am. This semester I have 8:30am and 9am. This has proved to be beneficial because I am more consistent with when I go to sleep and have become less tired in the mornings. When I began run crew this was harder to upkeep, but it is definitely a practice I am hoping to continue. Sleep debt cannot merely be eliminated by the weekend, and trying to could ultimately impact one’s health.
While I have known a lot of this for some time, I, like Sidney, did not realize how bad having a sleep pattern like this could be. The phrase you always here is, "you can't catch up on sleep." This is something that I think every DP has first hand experience with. I think the huge reason for this the way we get work in the School of Drama. The amount of work we have fluctuates so much, it is impossible to keep a steady sleep schedule. Even if you are good about not leaving projects to the last minute, there are always going to weeks where you have so much work that it is hard to get to sleep at a reasonable time, but other weeks this is something that is easy to do. For this reason, I think people's sleep schedules inherently have to vary. For this reason, the only consistency I think you find in a DP's sleep schedule is being able to somewhat sleep in on weekends, as it is the only time we have to do so.
I have read many articles about sleep and this one gave me info I never knew before. Most of the articles I read regarding sleep talk about negative effects of lack of sleep and oversleep. They usually focus on productivity, mental attitude, etc. This one adds in a more physical, negative effect information. It quite literally affects your hormone levels, weight, etc. This is very interesting because it reinforces in a new way how sleep really controls us. Sleep is something I have always taken seriously and it is interesting that over and under sleep are always being accounted for creating negative effects on a person. I have noticed this personally as high school caused me to severely under sleep and college has allowed me to sleep the proper amount. My mental being was pretty bad in high school and I do attribute this to my sleep while in College I seem to be thriving, at least in terms of sleep and attitude if nothing else.
I have seen these kinds of posts all over the blog page for some time now and every time I do I try and find an excuse for why I shouldn’t read it. This came very clear to me after reading just the second paragraph that this is something that I definitely need to stop doing. I always try to convince myself that I am just “making up” on some of my sleep and filling in for the time that I have missed during the week. The symptoms and the side effects are always something that I think I was aware about and new could be an issue but I have definitely started to see myself fall into as of late. I do need to work on making sure that my schedule is less dependent on late nights. Working so late and having to wake up for my morning class has forced me into this position and making sure that I get more and more consistent sleep will certainly help me in the long run with my work.
Everyone knows that not sleeping enough can cause detrimental effects on your body and mind, but people often see sleep as an easy sacrifice when their busy lives are concerned. In modern day education and workplaces, young people feel obligated to put their work ahead of their self care out of fear of falling behind. I know I personally often give up a few extra hours of sleep to keep up with all my projects, essays, and other coursework. I was unaware that trying to catch up on sleep over weekends is ineffective in helping the body recover from sleep loss during the week. I feel like now, having read this article, I will be more aware of how I shift my sleep schedule. I have recently made more of an effort to keep it consistent, however there is only so much I can do while trying to balance work, personal life, and school.
First of all, I acknowledge it is ironic that I am commenting on this article at midnight on a Friday… well technically Saturday. That aside, my first reaction to this is that I really like being able to sleep in on weekends. I know that this article is right, you can’t not get enough sleep during the week and then catch up on the weekend and it is all good, but what I can’t quite tell is if this article is claiming catching up on the weekend is as good as nothing. If you have a week where you only get 5 hours of sleep a night, is it better to then sleep extra on the weekend or just get back to a regular 8 hours as soon as possible but try to keep yourself from sleeping extra if you are tired. I think there are some things about this that seem to be linked to catching up on sleep, but not caused by it. For example, you can stay up late without snacking as long as you make the conscious decision not to snack. Overall, I know this article is right, but also I don’t know if I’m going to be able to give up sleeping in.
This really is the perfect place for this type of article. In all honesty, I've been one of those people who has sworn by the rule of "making up" sleep, that the sleep I lost during the week can suddenly be made up by a full days worth of sleep during the weekends. What I found was myself waking up in shear exhaustion, regretting that I even went to sleep in the first place. When it comes to sleep, I certainly have perfected nothing, but I did find a couple things that made sleeping and being awake to be slightly more balanced than what I was doing freshman year. One of the most important things I got from getting a more regular pattern of sleep was that I was able to get up in the morning, drink some coffee and get straight to work. Before, I would hide under the phrase, I'm a night owl, and in turn I would get no work done during the day.
Interesting. I think we all kind of know that you need a consistently good amount of sleep to stay healthy, and I think we all know that we really aren’t getting it. That said, I’m very surprised that the group in the experiment that got more sleep on the weekends not only did just as bad as the group with consistently little sleep, but worse. That actually explains a lot to me, I always feel awful in the mornings when I finally wake up after sleeping in on a Saturday. I know the ‘correct’ solution is to get more sleep always, but frankly, that’s not exceedingly possible on a school of drama schedule. Outside of crazy weeks, I usually get six to eight hours, and from my understanding, I’m doing better than most people on sleep. That makes me wonder if there are other benefits to sleeping in on the weekends over just getting less sleep, like focus and feeling awake, or whether it might honestly be better to just force myself to only get six hours a night even on weekends. It seems counterintuitive, but who knows?
My mother, a biology professor, teaches a class on circadian rhythms and often uses that knowledge to remind me of things like not using electronics late at night, not eating too late, and keeping a regular sleep schedule. She sent me this exact article last week because she knows that I, like most other students, fall into this trap often. As students with long class hours, an irregular crew schedule, and large-scale projects to contend with, committing to 8 hours of sleep a night is difficult even with the best intentions. I think we understand intuitively that trying to “catch up” on sleep is impossible, but after a long night, or multiple long nights as the case may be, there isn’t really another option. Since we’re on spring break right now, I feel like a healthy thing to do would be not to view this week as time to sleep as much as we can to store up for the last quarter, but instead to try to establish a regular sleep schedule and do our best to commit to it in the coming weeks.
I’m pretty guilty of having terribly irregular sleeping patterns, and very often either getting way too little sleep or way too much. I’ve always sort of known the health impacts it can have on you, but it’s pretty easy to ignore them when they’re not super drastic and you have a big project you’re working on in the moment. But sometimes this pattern is pretty unavoidable, especially since we get so much work during the week plus our classes, that the only times we really can get rest is on the weekends. So while we might not be able to technically catch up on sleep then, we try to because we’re so worn out from the five days beforehand. I’ve been getting better on trying to fix my sleep schedule and get into a healthier routine of not jumping between 4 or 10 hours of sleep and I have noticed somewhat of a change in energy levels/appetite when that gets thrown off. I think I tend to get drawn towards articles that discuss sleep and sleeping problems because I think I’m continually trying to convince myself to fix it.
As someone who averages around five to six hours of sleep per night, and is fully aware that it is not enough, sleep is a very complicated thing for me. For the most part, I already knew or had heard of all of the health complications that come from a lack of sleep, it is no secret that humans need sleep. I think what the majority of sleep studies do not take into consideration is the morning person versus night person personalities. Personally, I can stay up through all hours of the night and no matter how much sleep I get, waking up is always a struggle, and I think that is why sleeping on the weekends is such a gift for me. I have been told a couple times already in my college career to “bank on some sleep” which I never understood even before reading this article. Sleep seems to only apply to the activities of the day before so banking on that sleep for the weekend really does just throw off your routine.
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