Can You Make Up For Lost Sleep?

While it is a common claim to say that you are going to catch up on lost sleep during the weekends, the possibility of doing just that may not actually be in the cards. While it seems entirely logical that you could sleep a bit more to balance out your weekly sleep hours, your body can actually only catch up so much. If you only get seven hours of sleep a night during the weekdays, then making up for those lost five hours on  Saturday and Sunday can be done. However, if you’re only getting four hours of sleep a night, and you wind up missing out on 16+ hours of sleep, it isn’t as simple. While your body does have the ability to skip certain phases of regular sleep in order to get to the good quality, deep sleep, it can only make up for so much, so it is very important to try to get between seven and eight hours of sleep at night. A lack of good sleep can also lead to an early demise, on top of affecting daily performance. To get a good night’s sleep, practice some healthy sleep habits like developing a routine, not watching TV or using your phone before bed, set a bedtime, don’t drink caffeine heavily or after 3 P.M., and avoid napping.

Key Points:

  • 1If you want to live a long life set a sleep schedule and stick with it.
  • 2You can make up a certain amount of lost sleep by sleeping longer over the weekend, but you can only recover so much.
  • 35 hours of lost sleep is all you can actually make up for the rest is gone forever.


We can make up for a portion of the hours we lost on the weekend but not all of it.

See the original at: https://uamshealth.com/healthlibrary2/medicalmyths/lostsleep/


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Written by HealthStatus
Medical Writer & Editor

HealthStatus has been operating since 1998 providing the best interactive health tools on the Internet, millions of visitors have used our health risk assessment, body fat and calories burned calculators. The HealthStatus editorial team has continued that commitment to excellence by providing our visitors with easy to understand high quality health content for many years.

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