I saw something on the news the other night that made me feel quite good: You can actually "make up" lost sleep time.
I'll try to find a link. Basically, this dispells the old wives' tale that you can't make up for it.
I used to argue with my ex-wife about this. If I had a week of little sleep (5-6 hours/night for example), I'd try to sleep in on weekends to make it up. Empirical evidence always told me that it worked...I would feel much better having slept in rather than just getting eight hours on those weekends.
She insisted that you couldn't make up the lost sleep. We didn't have Snopes back then, so urban myths and other common held beliefs were left at that. I'm right again.
I was always "right" in our arguments, which is probably why we are divorced. I'm not right as often with my wife now.
Either I've changed, or I married a smarter woman this time.
(False dilemma: it's actually a bit of both.)
Elf
2 weeks ago
2 comments:
I saw something the other day, although I know I'll never be able to find it, that says that children can make up lost sleep time as well, but the amount of time necessary to make up the deficit is much larger than the original deficit (e.g. miss 2 hours, sleep an extra several hours over the week to catch up).
Interesting, but it seems to make sense since kids need more sleep period.
The doctor on the report talked of a "sleep defecit," and for adults at least it was a 1-for-1 sleep make-up ratio I think. He also said it doesn't work in reverse: you can't "store up" sleep to prepare for future lack of sleep.
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