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Making Up For Lost Sleep Takes Time

There are many pleasures to sleeping in on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Sleeping late or lying in bed and reading the newspaper or having a leisurely weekend breakfast can be a luxury well-worth indulging in, but if you’re sleeping in because you think that doing so will make up for all of the sleep that you’ve lost over the course of the week, think again. The idea that you can binge on sleep in order to be recharged for the following week is simply counterproductive, and can often end up making you feel worse.

The tendency to sleep in for extended hours on the weekends has been referred to as “sleep bulimia”.  The term encompasses the cycle that many of us pursue of sleeping too few hours and trying to fit in as much work or activity as possible into the weekdays, then lying in bed on the weekends to try to make up for the deprivation we’ve forced our bodies to endure. The truth is that every time you cheat yourself of an hour worth of sleep, you build up a sleep deficit that needs to be made up. That means that if you’ve slept just five or six hours a night on Monday through Friday, you’ve shorted yourself ten to fourteen hours. Not only would it be nearly impossible to make up for that amount of time on the weekend, but even if you tried, the body doesn’t work that way.

Sleep deprivation has to be made up over time – trying to get in all of the sleep that you’ve missed at once will end up making you feel irrationally irritable, unfocused, and sluggish – and it won’t make up for your deficit. If you want to find yourself feeling less run down on the weekends and feeling full of energy and alert all week long, the best answer is to stop cheating yourself of the sleep that you need.  When we push ourselves and choose sleep as our lowest priority, we are negatively impacting the performance and abilities that we have and our productivity and creativity during our waking hours. People who force themselves to give up their frenetic schedules and get the seven to nine hours of sleep that they need each night report that making the change actually allows them to get more done in less time, plus has the benefit of making them feel more energetic, happier and healthier.

Rather than trying to squeeze in your sleep, try making a change to your life that allows you to find more time for sleep. One of the best places to start is with your nighttime habits. Are you spending late night hours staring at your tablet, laptop or smart phone? Not only are you spending time on these activities that could be spent sleeping, you are actually exposing your brain to blue light that suppresses melatonin, the hormone that tells your body to go to sleep. That means that it’s even harder for you to get the restorative sleep that you need.

Finding more time for yourself to sleep does not necessarily mean that you have to give up hours of your personal time each night. Most people tend to need between seven and nine hours a night, with each of us having our own individual requirements. The best way to determine exactly what your own needs are is to put yourself to bed at the same time every evening for a period of a week and awaken without an alarm clock each morning. Once you’ve woken up, don’t roll back over and go back to sleep – get out of bed and start your day. After a few nights worth of making up for your sleep deprivation, you’ll find yourself waking up at the same time each morning, and you’ll have found out exactly how much sleep your body needs.

Getting the right amount of sleep is very important for a number of reasons. Research has shown that sleep provides immunity for the body and contributes to our overall health. It suppresses depression, improves our mood and our ability to learn and remember.  The downside of not getting enough sleep is higher risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and stroke, making upping sleep’s priority well worth it.

If you’re having trouble getting to sleep or waking up, there are a couple of tips that may be of some help.

When you use an alarm, be smart about it. When the alarm rings in the middle of a sleep cycle there is a good possibility that it will awaken you from the absolute deepest level of sleep that you can have. This ends up leaving you feeling out of sorts and groggy. Be aware that the average sleep cycle lasts 90 minutes and we experience several of the throughout the course of the night. Try to set your alarm at a multiple of 90 minutes from the time you go to bed to increase your chances of waking up at the end of a sleep cycle.

Remember that if you can’t sleep for a full seven to nine hours per night, you may be able to get the sleep you need by breaking it down into different sections. Getting two four hour periods of quality sleep in a night has the same impact as getting eight hours of solid sleep, so if you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t sweat it. Just relax, roll over, and go back to it.

Be smart about naps. Limiting nap time to no more than half an hour gives you the optimum amount of rest for feeling refreshed without letting yourself go so long as to leave you feeling groggy or unable to get to sleep later.

Leave your worries on a notepad. If you find yourself lying awake thinking about all that needs to be done, jot down a list on a pad kept next to your bed. That will release your mind of anxiety and let you fall off to sleep.

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