We need ~ eight hours of sleep every night, if we miss say three hours, two nights in a row, does it all accumulate onto the third day, or does our body train itself to requite fewer hours?

Question

We need ~ eight hours of sleep every night, if we miss say three hours, two nights in a row, does it all accumulate onto the third day, or does our body train itself to requite fewer hours?

In: Biology

Answer 1

You can’t really recover from lack of sleep. It all just keeps accumulating and there’s really no way to get that back, even if you sleep 10 hours one day or add in naps. Sadly, we still don’t really understand what exactly sleep does for us, we just know it’s incredibly important.

But you can get used to getting much less sleep than average. Many severe insomniacs get less than 3 hours a day, and we seem to get by just fine. It’s not healthy, but that’s just the way psychological disorders go.

A lot of websites will tell you “after 20 hours without sleep, you’ve got the same mental acuity as a drunk person!” and they’re just absolutely wrong.