Is getting 6 hours of sleep one night and 10 hours the next equivalent to sleeping 8 hours and 8 hours?
In: Biology
Not really. Though lack of sleep will build up.
Think of it like emptying a trash can. You empty the trash once a night. Regardless of if the trash can was only a little full or overflowing, it is the same level of empty after you dump it.
No.
The best measures of sleep quality come from falling asleep at the same time and waking up at the same time every day, AND the time spent asleep should be 8 hours.
Most of us don’t succeed at this, but I’ve done 7.5 on the same alarms for a few months straight, and it feels marvelous.
But to answer your question again… No. You cannot “bank” sleep by oversleeping the night prior or “bounce back” by making up for lost sleep the next night. Your body wants you to fall asleep at the same time every night and to wake up at the same time every morning.
Yes, even weekends.
No. You can’t bank sleep in advance, or “make up” past last sleep.
Think of sleeping as “emptying the garbage pail in your kitchen”. Sleeping clears out waste that’s constantly being generated.
– Emptying the garbage twice in one day doesn’t let you go twice as long after that before it overflows.
– letting it start overflowing, then emptying it twice in a row doesn’t help either
The short answer is no.
Sleep debt is a complicated subject, but generally you don’t want to make up the sleep debt all at once. If it’s just a single day of two hours of sleep debt, it should be fine, but if you sleep for 6 hours every night for a week, sleeping for 22 hours straight the next night doesn’t fix the issue.
In UPT in the air force they taught us “You cannot bank sleep credits, but you can certainly go into sleep debt”. You can get back to normal, but you cant save up sleep for later. If you sleep 6 hrs one night, youll be a bit groggy maybe. You might need to sleep 10 hrs the next night to get back to normal. But just because you slept 10 hours last night does not mean you can only get 6 hours tonight and wake up feeling like you had a full 8.
Equivalent in what way? If the goal is to not be drowsy then yes. But if the goal is to learn skills or remember information then probably not.
It is equivalent to charging your battery to 75% one day then (trying) to charge it to 125% the next.
So not really no.
It’s not a 1:1, but everyone likes to pretend that “catching up” does nothing and it’d be the same as if you just constantly deprived yourself. Anecdotally, that has not been my experience at all, and I think people are full of shit. These are probably the same people who say there is “zero” nutrition in a McDonalds quarter pounder. Sure, a straight 8 on a regular sleep schedule is ideal, but shit happens.
I also bodybuild, and not trying to catch up noticeably slows down my muscle recovery if I shorted myself the day beforehand
It’s not 1to1. It’s a good idea to get more sleep after you’ve gotten less, but you can’t trade hour for hours. It also matters how many high and low activity cycles your brain goes through. It’s frustratingly inexact because we don’t actually understand sleep all that well.
Sleep is when your brain cleans itself. Your nerves retract and the fluid flow increases to wash out all the neurotransmitters that got left floating around.
So you can fall behind on sleep, but you can’t get ahead on sleep.
You can get something dirty enough that it’s hard to get it clean, but you can’t get something clean enough that it’s hard to get it dirty.
For me, aligning my waking up time with sunlight has worked wonders for me. It’s been over 4 years since I have been off alarm (obviously I set alarms when there is something important and I can’t miss it). And almost always I wake up around the same and start falling asleep around the same time. Listening to the body is also important. If it is asking you to sleep, just sleep. Don’t force it.
So in the summer, I wake up around 5 AM IST, but as the winters come my waking up time shifts to 7-8 AM IST. The thing with daylight is once it hits your eyes and you wake up, your body doesn’t feel the need to sleep more. You spring up from your bed full of energy. Since the nights are shorter during summer, someday I do take a nap in the afternoon but that again is decided by my body.
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