if you go multiple nights without enough sleep, it makes sense that you get more tired, but does this also mean you need to sleep more to “catch up” and feel rested?
and would this extra amount of sleep correspond to how “behind” on sleep you are? or is it more like a battery, where the maximum amount of sleep doesn’t change ?
In: Biology
There are two aspects.
1. If you miss out on sleep, there is some “damage” done that you can’t fix or undo with any amount of sleep.
2. There are some downsides which you can undo with more sleep.
So yes, the longer you go without enough sleep, can require you to sleep more to catch up, but there is some damage done that you can never catch up on.
I don’t really like the comparison with a battery, where eight hours is enough to reach a full charge no matter how depleted you were. I also don’t like the comparison with debt, where if you sleep two hours less one night then you need to sleep two hours more the next night.
I think “hygiene” is a better metaphor. For example, washing dishes by hand: if you don’t wash dishes after one meal, then after the next meal there are going to be more dishes than usual in the sink, and it’ll take longer than usual to wash all of them. Will it take exactly twice as long? No, probably not: you may still only have to fill the sink up with soap and water once, even if you’re washing a larger-than-usual volume of dishes. (But on the other hand, some of the food on the old dishes will be dried on and so the dishes will require more scrubbing than they would have if you’d washed them immediately.)
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