2024-03-26 16:00:00
We all fall asleep from time to time. Is sleeping five hours a night from Monday to Friday, then having two lie-ins on the weekend, the best way to make up for a sleep deficit? How to rest and recover after a sleepless night?
How to get back to sleep quickly after a sleepless night?
For several years, scientists have published studies on this subject. While the majority reiterated that it was impossible to make up for lost sleep, work published in 2018 affirmed that sleeping more on weekends could negate some of the health risks associated with lack of sleep during the week. What do you think?
“It is first of all necessary to distinguish between people who have not slept during a night, and people who are in chronic sleep deprivation during the weekand will make up for it on the weekend by sleeping more,” explains Dr. Marie-Françoise Vecchierini, member of the INSV, neuropsychiatrist and sleep specialist at the Hôtel-Dieu Paris.
Usually, if you haven’t slept one night, and you go to bed at the end of the day, you’ll have a ‘sleep bounce,’ usually on the first night and sometimes on the next night, says Mary. -Françoise Vecchierini, member of the INSV, neuropsychiatrist and sleep specialist at the Hôtel Dieu Paris.
“This sleep rebound mainly concerns the slow, deep sleep – this very restorative sleep – and a little on the paradoxical sleep. It will be a few hours with a significant increase in the amount of sleep that is deemed restorative and restorative.”
Lack of sleep affects health
Lack of sleep has consequences on the body, recalls Dr. Vecchierini: the first often being a fatiguea loss of alertness and efficiencya disruption of the circadian rhythm. Lack of sleep also leads to an increase in the consumption of fatty and sugary foods and snacking, thus promoting weight gain and in the long term an additional risk of developing obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, decline in immune defenses…
Is it possible to catch up on sleep over the weekend?
“People who are chronically sleep deprived, for their part, extend their sleep time during the weekend. The problem in this is not so much extending one’s sleep time, but rather the risk of unbalance circadian rhythms,” continues the specialist. Indeed, depending on its chronotype (how many hours I need to sleep and between what time and what time I need to sleep), you need to have stability in your sleep schedule.
How much sleep to recover?
“Thus, the extra sleep that comes over the weekend should not exceed approximately 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours », said Dre Vecchierini.
Beyond 2 hours, we consider that we unbalance our biological clock a little, we create an imbalance in the sleep-wake rhythm and other rhythms which can be detrimental. Dr. Vecchierini
So, if you sleep two to three hours more than usual, you will have even less desire to sleep early in the evening, and you will unbalance your rhythm. To properly catch up on sleep, apart from the necessary amount of sleep, respecting the regularity of schedules is therefore essential.
“We must also pay attention to its environment », adds the specialist, that is to say sleeping in a ideal roomwith good bedding, good temperature, avoiding electronic devices or heavy meals before sleeping, etc.
Does a nap allow for good sleep recovery?
It is possible to add a little extra sleep by taking a napbut under two conditions, indicates Dr. Vecchierini:
It should not be too long (no more than 20 to 30 minutes);It must be done in the early afternoon.
How to do ? Start by exposing yourself to light as much as possible in the morning, in order to maintain a regular biological rhythm. Then schedule a nap of at least 20 minutes during the afternoon, not too close to bedtime.
Do you have some sleep to catch up on this week? If you are exhausted on Saturday morning, opt for an afternoon nap rather than a long night. But the goal remains, of course, to sleep well throughout the week, regularly and sufficiently, so as not to have to catch up.
Sleep deprivation: caffeine doesn’t help that much
Researchers evaluated the effectiveness of caffeine in countering the harms of sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities and published the results in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (source 1). 275 participants completed a simple attention task as well as a « space management » more demanding. Verdict: “We found that sleep deprivation impaired performance on both tasks and that caffeine consumption helped people succeed on the easier task. But, it had little effect on space management task performance for most of the participants,” summarized Professor Kimberly Fenn, who led the study, in a press release. While “caffeine may improve the ability to stay awake and attend to a task, it does little to prevent the kind of procedural errors that can cause medical errors or car accidents ».
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