Did you think that a weekend dozing on your couch was enough to recover from a week of neglecting your sleep? Well, think again: alternating between late sleep and sleeping in is not good for your health.
No matter how much rest you took on the weekend, it won’t make up for the accumulated sleep debt during your working week… This is the conclusion of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Their work has been published in Current Biology and demonstrate that a weekly sleep in is not an adequate solution against the damage caused by nights of sleep lost during the week. The most frustrating thing about all of this? Sleeping too much in your free time can actually make it worse, if you go back to your sleeping habits. sleep deprivation from the start of the following week. We explain why.
Lack of sleep: underestimated risks
“Our findings suggest that the habitual behavior of depriving yourself of sleep during the week and attempting to compensate for it on the weekend is not an effective health strategy,” said Kenneth Wright, director of the laboratory UC Boulder’s Sleep and Chronobiology. Indeed, it is common knowledge that doing too much short nights is bad for our health, but we do not necessarily know what the real risks are. Yet lack of sleep has been proven to be linked to obesity and diabetes. Research also suggests it increases cravings, decreases insulin sensitivity, and impairs our ability to regulate sugar. Other studies link lack of sleep to depression, neurodegeneration and Alzheimer’s disease. It appears that even a restless night’s sleep may be enough to affect genes that control metabolic function.
To determine the detrimental effects of our lack of sleep on our health, Dr. Wright and his colleagues conducted a study on 36 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 39 and monitored their sleep for nine nights. The group was divided into three subgroups: one group allowed to sleep nine hours a night, another maximum five hours a night, and a third that alternates between the two: five hours a night for five nights, then as much as they wish for two nights, followed by two more nights of restricted sleep.
“Alternate short nights and sleepy mornings and particularly disturbing”
Results ? The team noted increased snacking, weight gain, and reduced insulin sensitivity in both sleep-deprived groups. Those allowed two days of sleep-in noted signs of improvement during those two days, but any benefits disappeared once the limited sleep resumed. Moreover, this group ended up showing worse results on the measure of insulin sensitivity at the end of the study: the group limited to five hours of sleep recorded a 13% drop in total body insulin sensitivity, while those who alternated recorded drops between 9 and 27%, the sensitivity of the liver and muscles being particularly weak.
“In the end, we only found no metabolic benefit in people who slept over the weekend,” said Chris Depner, lead author of the study. particularly disturbing“, concluded Doctor Wright.
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