Catching Up on Lost Sleep (April 29, 2014)
Sleep deprivation that is acute (meaning no more than a few hours over several days in someone who is normally well rested) produces worsened vision, impaired driving, and trouble remembering, plus increased levels of stress and inflammatory hormones. If the sleep deprivation is chronic (over more than three months), the long-term effects of obesity, insulin resistance and heart disease kick in as well.
If you usually get enough sleep and aren’t missing much, your body will naturally compensate by trying to increase your time asleep until the deficit is made up. And if it’s successful in achieving this, the levels of stress and inflammatory hormones that increased due to the sleep loss will return to normal (although the cognitive impairments will continue for some time). But if you chronically deprive yourself of sleep, your body loses the ability to compensate for it. You actually stop feeling sleepy and start “naturally” sleeping fewer hours – and when that happens, the negative effects also become a “natural” part of your life.
It’s theorized that even if you’ve been chronically sleep deprived for many years that you can catch back up, but there are no shortcuts. If you’ve got a sleep deficit of, say, a couple of thousand hours, you have to catch back up on them, an extra hour or two per night at a time. Go to bed when you are tired, and allow your body to naturally wake you in the morning. Expect to sleep on the order of ten hours a night and find yourself feeling like the walking dead during the day in the beginning of the recovery cycle. As the weeks pass, however, the amount of time you spend sleeping will gradually decrease. As you erase sleep debt, your body will come to rest at a sleep pattern that is specifically your own – one you may never have known before – and you will start to experience a level of energy and well-being that you thought was gone forever.
Rather than trying to make up for lost sleep, a regular nap (about a half hour is ideal; more than an hour will affect your night’s sleep) to sort of “bank sleep” ahead of time is a much better idea, if you have that choice.
--dr. diane holmes
Copyright © 2014
Sleep deprivation that is acute (meaning no more than a few hours over several days in someone who is normally well rested) produces worsened vision, impaired driving, and trouble remembering, plus increased levels of stress and inflammatory hormones. If the sleep deprivation is chronic (over more than three months), the long-term effects of obesity, insulin resistance and heart disease kick in as well.
If you usually get enough sleep and aren’t missing much, your body will naturally compensate by trying to increase your time asleep until the deficit is made up. And if it’s successful in achieving this, the levels of stress and inflammatory hormones that increased due to the sleep loss will return to normal (although the cognitive impairments will continue for some time). But if you chronically deprive yourself of sleep, your body loses the ability to compensate for it. You actually stop feeling sleepy and start “naturally” sleeping fewer hours – and when that happens, the negative effects also become a “natural” part of your life.
It’s theorized that even if you’ve been chronically sleep deprived for many years that you can catch back up, but there are no shortcuts. If you’ve got a sleep deficit of, say, a couple of thousand hours, you have to catch back up on them, an extra hour or two per night at a time. Go to bed when you are tired, and allow your body to naturally wake you in the morning. Expect to sleep on the order of ten hours a night and find yourself feeling like the walking dead during the day in the beginning of the recovery cycle. As the weeks pass, however, the amount of time you spend sleeping will gradually decrease. As you erase sleep debt, your body will come to rest at a sleep pattern that is specifically your own – one you may never have known before – and you will start to experience a level of energy and well-being that you thought was gone forever.
Rather than trying to make up for lost sleep, a regular nap (about a half hour is ideal; more than an hour will affect your night’s sleep) to sort of “bank sleep” ahead of time is a much better idea, if you have that choice.
--dr. diane holmes
Copyright © 2014