It is common knowledge that sleep is essential for health. However, new research suggests that the ability to readily “catch up” on lost sleep later is more myth than fact. Investigators in Poland carefully evaluated adults who spent ten consecutive days experiencing partial sleep deprivation, getting about one-third less sleep than usual.

It turned out that the participants did not easily recover from these sleep deficits even after extra “make-up” sleep on subsequent days.

One sleep expert said, “This study adds to a large body of evidence that insufficient sleep has detrimental effects on our daytime functioning and in particular highlights that even a short duration of obtaining only less than seven-plus hours of sleep causes persistence of impairment for up to a week.”

Many people believe that they can “make up” for lost sleep by sleeping longer on the weekends, for example.

However, this new research suggests that we may be greatly overestimating this ability.

The results appeared in the journal PLOS ONE.

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