What is sleep debt?
"Sleep debt" is a term used to describe the cumulative loss of sleep resulting from ongoing sleep deprivation.
If you work long hours during the week and want to catch up on sleep over the weekend, or have episodes that keep you awake most of the night, you've probably wondered: "Is it possible to catch up on my sleep?"
Is it possible to make up for lost sleep?
The answer is no. For the most part, once sleep is lost, it's gone forever.
But don't worry. This is actually a good sign.
Let's suppose your body needs 7 hours per night to rest well, but one night you end up staying awake all night for some reason. The next day, you go about your activities feeling unhappy and less productive than usual (these physical effects of sleep deprivation are normal!). Now the following night arrives and you allow yourself to sleep as long as you need. How long will you sleep on your second night? 14 hours? No!
And here's the good news—you don't need to!
You can fully recover with just a few days of your normal sleep patterns.
This happens because when your body is very tired, it optimizes your sleep to prioritize deep sleep and REM stages, which are the most restorative stages, so they occur in the first hours of your next sleep.
Want to see an extreme example of how this works in practice?
The story of Randy Gardner
The record for staying awake the longest belongs more or less to Randy Gardner, who set it at age 17 in 1965. He stayed awake for 11 days without sleeping while being observed by researchers.
We say "more or less" because there are reports of people who stayed awake longer, in extraordinary situations or in scientific investigations not as well documented as Randy Gardner's.
It doesn't really matter who stayed awake the longest; the limit of human wakefulness is about 10 days. But what happened after so much sleep debt? It's normal for a person to sleep more than usual. But in Randy's case, he didn't sleep the nearly 80 lost hours—instead, he slept about 15 hours, and the second night he slept about 11 hours. And shortly after, his sleep was regulated again.
But you might ask: He didn't sleep just 7 hours the following night. He slept more. When I sleep less, I also feel sleepier than normal—can't I sleep a few extra hours?
Recovering lost sleep
Yes, there is still a small portion of your lost sleep that you can make up for.
There are two methods for you to do this:
- Return to your normal sleep schedule or
- Sleep more than you normally would the following night.
As we've seen, extending time in bed is one of the main factors that may have made your insomnia even stronger, which is why here at Vigilantes do Sono we strongly recommend that you follow the first method.
We advocate this because sleeping a bit more than normal can deplete the sleep pressure you've built up. Without this healthy level of sleep pressure, your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep will decrease.
Furthermore, this can happen precisely when your desire to sleep is even stronger, and you'll increase the likelihood of spending more time awake in bed, which we've already seen is the perfect formula for increasing insomnia.
There are some situations in life where using intuition is the best we can do. But this isn't one of them. Don't trust your intuition to recover sleep—trust the years of study and scientific validation in the field of sleep. Trust CBT-I.