Catching Up On Sleep? Think Again
If you’ve been skimping on your sleep during the week while planning to make up for it with extra shut-eye over the weekend, you might want to rethink your plan. According to a study released in the January 13 issue of Science Translational Medicine, sleeping in on Saturday might make you feel better in the short term, but the negative effects of chronic sleep loss will linger on and on and on …
According to the study: “chronic sleep loss from six hours of sleep per night for two weeks causes a similar level of impairment as staying awake for 24 hours” and, at this point, experts do not know how many nights of sufficient sleep it takes to make up for that loss.
The study also notes that approximately 16 percent of Americans routinely operate on 6 hours of sleep a night. Experts we’ve interviewed recommend getting at least 7 hours!
You can read more about the study here.
So, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Image: Corbis
—Stephanie Kinnear, web editor
