How long does it take for the body to recover after several days of poor sleep?

To find out if it is possible to recover from lack of sleep and, if so, how long it takes, a team from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland, recruited 13 volunteers to suffer ten poor quality nights, interrupted sleep.

It seems, It may take over a week to recover from memory and reaction speed issues that develop after 10 days of poor sleep. according to research published in the journal PLOS One.

During those ten nights and a week of good, uninterrupted sleep, volunteers answered questions, wore wrist sensors, and underwent tests. EEG tests (EEG) daily. After the week of good sleep, the response rates of the volunteers returned to normal, but memory and other pre-sleep deprivation functions remained slow.

Jeremi Ochab, the lead author of the study said that previous research had explored the impact of sleep deprivation, but it was the first to show that it takes more than a week of solid sleep for reaction times and memory recall to return to normal levels.

Sleep deprivation is not a new phenomenon, but researchers say seems to be becoming more common in the modern world. Loss of rest, especially for long periods, This can lead to changes in the circadian rhythm, loss of alertness, reduced attention span, and memory problems.

“Understand if the human brain recovers from chronic sleep loss and how it recovers this is important not only from a scientific point of view but also from a public health point of view ”, according to the Polish team.

outraged sleep monitors and the trials of SEE, study volunteers performed a variety of reaction and memory tests, as well as they also answered questions.

23 were initially recruited, but because some gave up and others didn’t stick to the bad sleep routine, they only stayed 13 to provide useful data. Of those 12 were female and 1 was male, with an average age of 21 years old. The study volunteers slept in their own homes, during the 21-day experiment, and all were in good health.

During the 21 days, participants the first four days went normally, sleep as they normally would, followed by 10 days of “chronic partial sleep”, what is it 30% of what someone would normally need. They finally got a week of deep sleep.

Throughout the experiment, the researchers continuously measured spontaneous locomotor activity and subjected it to EEG measurements. They measured how long the volunteers were resting and performing different tasks, reaction times and accuracy, and brain waves.

“We observe a unanimous deterioration of all measures during sleep restriction ”, the team explained, confirming that volunteers performed poorly with less sleep.

“Other results indicate that one week of recovery from prolonged periods of sleep restriction is insufficient for complete recovery. After seven days of recovery, participants still had not returned to pre-sleep deprivation performance on most measures of functioning. Only their reaction times had returned to initial levels, ”added the team, which hopes to continue its experiments with. a larger pool of volunteers in the future, as good as Investigate longer recovery periods.

This this would allow them to disentangle the order in which the different brain functions return to normal, because some had not fully returned after seven days of good sleep. How they stopped the investigation after a week of good sleep, now they cannot determine when other functions, such as memory recall, have fully returned to normal.

Studying the recovery process after a prolonged period of sleep restriction reveals that there are differences in behavioral, motor and neurophysiological responses in both sleep loss and recovery ”, they added.

An earlier study, published in August, found that a 30-minute nap in the middle of the day cannot compensate for the lack of sleep the night before. Connoisseurs of University of Michigan measured the extent to which lack of sleep leads to cognitive decline and found that short naps are only associated with slight relief from sleep deprivation, and only if you are sleeping soundly.

The Polish study had other limitations, including the use of caffeine. “Volunteers were initially asked to avoid drinking coffee during the 21-day experiment, but due to the nature of the study and the extended period of sleep deprivation, they reported that it was possible that they could not meet the expectations of the study and refrain from taking a nap ”, explain the authors. And they added: “Therefore, we decided that caffeine was allowed for participants to complete the study according to the prescribed schedule, but the specific amounts of the drinks were not recorded ”. “In addition, we have learned that caffeine appears to have limited effectiveness in maintaining alertness during prolonged sleep restriction ”, they concluded.

KEEP READING: