ELi5: Experts say you can’t “pre-sleep” and also can’t catch up on lost sleep; what exactly does that mean? Since it’s not like I feel tired for the rest of my life after missing a night’s sleep, after a few days of good sleep I’m back to normal.

Question

Does “not being able to catch up on lost sleep” mean that every night of lost sleep accumulates to a shorter life span, more illness, or something of the sort?

In: Biology

Answer 1

I take it to mean that there is only one optimal or “right” amount of sleep for a specific person, regardless of the situation.

If your body functions best with 8.5 hours of sleep, that will be true every night, regardless of how many hours you got (or failed to get) the night before. So if you stay up all night and feel exhausted, the solution is to get 8.5 hours of sleep, not 10 hours. Accordingly you can’t “bank” sleep by getting 10 hours the night before you plan to miss some hours. You’ll still be just as tired or even more so, because 10 hours exceeds your optimal amount.

I think this is mostly true. I worked in the film industry for many years, and often got 3-5 hours of sleep during the week. If I tried to over-sleep on the weekend, to make up for it, I didn’t feel much benefit. Around 8 hours was best. Although there is a caveat, that I found after a week of little sleep, it was harder to get restful sleep. I would end up staying in bed for 10 hours, with a few hours of restlessness interrupting the actual deep sleep.