Is getting 6 hours of sleep one night and 10 hours the next equivalent to sleeping 8 hours and 8 hours?
In: Biology
Nope, sleep doesn’t “average” if you don’t sleep well your body can’t recover completely, you may recover if you sleep more the next day but you also need consistency, our bodies work in cycles and if you don’t have a schedule those cycles get messed up
I’m reading a book on dementia by Dr sanjay Gupta and he says no. You need consistent sleep. Wake up the same time every day including weekends and holidays and go to sleep the same. It would seem it’s really important
ELI5: No, you should get the same amount of sleep each night.
Not ELI5: It’s usually better to sleep the same amount each night. Consistency is key, and sleep is not a zero-sum game. But if you consistently maintained an alternating schedule It might work out. 6 and 10 probably wouldn’t be a good choice, though, and here’s why.
Sleep isn’t a matter of raw time it comes in cycles. You go through various levels of sleep during a cycle (wake, light, intermediate, deep, and REM). Generally, you need about 4-6 cycles per day, and cycles are typically 80-100 minutes.
The standard 8 hours of sleep is 5 cycles at 90 minutes with 30 mins buffer for falling asleep, waking up, and not perfectly timed cycles. So, 6 hours (4 cycles) and 9 hours (6 cycles) might work better
No.
The only way to recover a sleep debt is to consistently sleep the same schedule for a while. For instance, it will take about 4 days of normal sleep to recover from 1 hour of deficit.
Sleep is incredibly important for our body to function properly. That next level in your vidja game can wait.
No.
One of sleep’s key functions is its ability to “save” and “cleanse” our memories.
Sleep can be classified into two stages: REM and NREM sleep. One looks at all the memories you have had in a day, and removes all the extraneous information. The other takes the remaining information, and strengthens its connections. This process repeats numerous times to fully process all your memories, similar to making a stone sculpture.
All this is to say that sleep is a long process that requires many hours to cleanse and polish, cleanse and polish your memories for that specific day. And if you don’t sleep that day, you basically “miss the boat”, and you’ll never get a chance to reinforce those memories again.
Obviously sleep has countless benefits, physical, emotional – its hard to find a function of the human body that isn’t affected by sleep, and it’s harder to find one that runs optimally without it.
Its just that I personally think this aspect of “memories” and “missing the boat” is the most important point to consider in terms of sleep debt, and it being impossible to pay back.
For me the best way to think about it is like a video game. You’ve got a health bar that depletes every day. Getting sleep is like taking a potion to replenishe the bar. 8 hours of sleep (or however much you need, 8 is typical but not the only number) brings you back to full health. Less than that brings you closer to full but leaves a deficit. More than that does nothing. When the health bar is maxed out more potions don’t do anything and they don’t wait until the bar starts draining to take effect.
The game also limits how many potions you can take a day. It’s wrong when people say you can’t make up sleep. It’s not like one bad sleep will leave you damaged forever. But it is true that you can’t go into deficit for weeks or months and make it all up by crashing for 16 hours that one time you got a break.
Sleeping is like showering for your brain. As you stay awake, your brain accumulates more and more waste. When you sleep, it cleans itself out.
If your previous cleaning session was too short (6 hr) to finish the job, you might need a longer (10 hr) cleaning session to get your brain back to pristine condition. But having a longer cleaning session for a brain that’s already sufficiently clean has diminishing returns, and doesn’t make your next cleaning session shorter.
I worked with a sleep psychologist and psychiatrist before on my insomnia. From what she told me about the research she was involved in: kind of, but in reverse. If you do not sleep well, the next sleep you do spend more time in deep restorative sleep cycles than if you were not sleep deprived. However if you sleep extra it does not mean more time in deep sleep, in actuality the longer you sleep, the “extra” sleep is spend on lighter sleep cycles so you do not “bank” extra sleep.
There are also medications that can change how much time you spend in deep sleep vs light sleep.
No, there is no sleep recovery. Your body is going to be affected by the changes. Each time you change your sleep schedule it will throw you off.
When you sleep, your body is cleaning your brain (repairing cells, removing junk chemicals, etc). It can only get so clean, so there’s only so much sleep that will benefit you. If you are sleep deprived, your brain builds up grime so you can definitely end up in a bad sleep deficit (like letting dishes accumulate in your sink over several days) But sleeping for 12 hours doesn’t make the brain any “cleaner” than sleeping 8.
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