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There are many reasons why many of us do not get the seven hours or more of sleep recommended each night. Travel schedules, work schedules, excessive television hours and, especially, having young children have negative consequences.
Research published recently in the journal To sleep notes that up to six years after the birth of a child, many mothers and fathers still do not sleep as much as before their child's birth. For parents, there is just less time in the day to focus on yourself.
So, can you catch up on sleep? It depends in part on how much sleep you missed.
A study in the current issue of Current biology Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, recruited a group of healthy young adults who agreed to stay in a sleep lab. Some were allowed to sleep no more than five hours a night for five consecutive days.
"After five days, people [gained] up to 5 pounds, "says Christopher Depner, author of the study, who studies the links between sleep loss and metabolic diseases. Lack of sleep can destroy hormones that regulate appetite, he says, so people tend to eat more.
Depner and his colleagues also documented a decrease in insulin sensitivity in participants deprived of sleep. "In some people, the number of cases is considered pre-diabetic," he says. Presumably, this increase in blood sugar would only be temporary in these young healthy people. But it's a striking indicator of the extent to which a lack of sleep can influence the metabolism.
And even after a weekend of catch-up sleep, participants still took up as much weight as those in the study who had not been allowed to sleep longer.
In summary, our metabolism may have difficulty recovering from a week of sleep deprivation and, over time, chronic sleep loss may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
These discoveries are revealing, but they do not give a complete picture. After all, many of us who lose our sleep miss only a few hours here or there. Our sleep loss is occasional and not chronic.
Consider this scenario: you have a long day of travel and arrive late at home, for example, at 2am. And you have to get up at dawn for a meeting the next day. Is this a big deal?
"The short-term effect is that you are a little more sleepy – your concentration is low, or [you may lose] Says Dr. Chris Winter, sleep specialist in Charlottesville, Virginia. But what is the long-term effect of a night of partial sleep loss?
"I do not think there really is one," Winter said.
The winter says that our body compensates for the bad nights of sleep. "This correction is likely to happen fairly quickly," says Winter. "You only slept four hours last night, so you'll probably sleep well next night."
Thus, although it is ideal to go to bed and get up at the same time each day, it is not always possible to stick to this routine. And, a recent study on longevity suggests that it's OK. "We are very adaptable," says Winter.
Swedish researchers have examined the relationship between sleep duration on weekdays and weekends. The study included about 44,000 people followed for 13 years. The researchers found that people who sleep less during the week but compensate for the delay by prolonged sleep are not likely to die prematurely. The researchers concluded that "prolonged sleep at the end of the week can compensate for a short sleep during the week". They published their findings in the Journal of Sleep Research.
"If you need seven hours of sleep a night, you really need 49 hours a week," says Winter. In other words, it is probably okay to slightly vary your sleep over a short period of time, provided that it fits your needs.
"Yes, I think you can recover the lost sleep," says Winter. "I do not think I'll ever catch up on the sleep I lost at the medical school and at the residence, but I think in the short term you will be able to do it."
Nevertheless, there is a potential disadvantage to sleeping on weekends: too much sleep can disrupt your biological clock. So an hour or two of extra sleep, that's fine, but you do not want to sleep so long on Sunday mornings that it's hard to fall asleep on Sunday nights.
Another way to recover: Take a nap.
"A 20-minute nap can make up for an hour of lost sleep," says Jim Horne, a sleep researcher and professor emeritus of psychophysiology at the University of Loughborough, UK. He published a study in 2011 demonstrating the benefits of a 20-minute nap. .
Horne also reports a summary study concluding that daytime naps can help improve performance, from improving memory to alertness. But here's a tip: do not nap after 3pm, as it may interfere with your nighttime sleep.
And Horne has another nap strategy for times when you want to wake up very alert.
"People call it a nap," says Horne. The idea: go to bed immediately after drinking a cup of coffee.
"It takes 20 minutes for this coffee to start," explains Horne. It's just enough time to catch a few Z's, and it has been shown that it's "a very effective combination" for sleepy drivers, he says.
The caffeine-plus-nap strategy now bears several names. My favorite (with a hat tip to writer Daniel Pink): the napkin.
Follow Allison Aubrey from NPR at @AubreyNPRFood.
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