Can you prepare your body for less sleep?

You might know it: you know that a busy period is coming soon with less sleep, so you sleep a little more in the weeks before. You then compensate for your sleep, as it were. Is that correct? Can you really prepare your body for this?

Sleep banking

In short, it is indeed possible to compensate for sleep deprivation for a short period of time by temporarily sleeping extra in advance. That is also in English sleep banking (loosely translated: presleep), which was first studied in 2009. According to sleep expert Dr Sophie Bostock the idea seems to come from the military and elite sports world, where there are more frequent times when you can’t make the recommended seven to nine hours.

In a French study in 2015, participants slept seven or nine hours a night before cutting their sleep to just three hours. It turns out that the people in the nine-hour group, who got a few extra hours of sleep, coped better with the week of sleep deprivation. For example, in a reaction time test, they were less likely to make mistakes and recover faster.

Unhealthy

“There is certainly some evidence that it is possible, at least occasionally, to prepare for sleep deprivation,” explains Dr. Bostock. But don’t do this too often, she warns. “If you do this constantly, you end up putting a lot of pressure on your biological clock to cycle back and forth, and this puts you at increased risk of disease.”

Sleeping before a match

Sleepbanking occurs mainly in the top sport world, where training is required for competitions. “We have done a lot of research among athletes and see that they indicate that they sleep worse after a game compared to other nights,” says sleep expert Els van der Helm. Nu.nl.

According to sports doctor Kasper Janssen, this should in principle not be a problem if athletes have had enough sleep. He tells Nu.nl about this: “For example, by using a so-called full cycle nap to take. In one and a half hours you go through a full sleep cycle, so you also fall into deep sleep. This is especially important for physical recovery. You have to train this in advance and not try it out on a match day.”

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