Sleeping in on the weekends is not enough

There are many health risks with sleeping too little and a study from the University of Colorado Boule shows that it doesn't help to regain sleep on weekends.

A group of subjects were only allowed to sleep for five hours for five days. The lack of sleep caused them to eat more, especially of sweets. Some subjects then slept for two days and slept about an hour longer than normal. Then, the increased consumption of sweets went down.

But when they got their sleep limited to five hours again, the daily rhythm shifted and they started eating more again. In addition, they were shown to have decreased insulin sensitivity. It was even worse than that of a control group that was allowed to sleep for five hours throughout the period. Decreased insulin sensitivity is a well-known risk factor for both diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Previous research has shown that the brain tries to regain lost sleep the next night by increasing the proportion of deep sleep and, if possible, sleeping longer. But exactly how much the body can recover on a weekend has so far been unknown.

- In the past, research has only been done on what happens after a weekend of sleep recovery. The interesting thing is that here you have tested to see what it will be like when you return to too little sleep again. That has not been done before, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt, sleep scientist and professor at the stress research institute at Stockholm University.

Some of the results he believes can be explained by the fact that those who got to sleep for two days also changed their daily rhythm.

- The fact that those who slept for two days got even worse insulin sensitivity than those who slept poorly all the time probably is because they went up much later. To push the biological clock so much is bad for health, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.

He hopes that in the future you will be able to carry out longer studies that extend over three to four weeks, to be able to see how many days of sleep recovery you need to compensate for a week of poor sleep.

The study was published in Current biology