If regular two-day weekends never seem like enough time for your sleep (or your sanity) to recover, it's not just in your head: A new study in the American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism confirms that two days of sleeping in really isn’t enough to recover lost sleep.
In the study, researchers set 30 healthy adults on a 13-day sleep schedule. For the first four nights, they slept a normal eight hours. But for the next six nights, participants were woken up two hours earlier in the morning in order to simulate restricted workweek sleep. Finally researchers allowed them to sleep 10 solid hours for the next three nights.
Not surprisingly, five days of restricted sleep rendered the subjects significantly sleepier compared to their baseline. But researchers also noticed a spike in interleukin-6, a marker for inflammation in the body. Their performance on an attention test took a serious dive, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol stayed the same.
Here’s the kicker: While two days of recovery sleep was able to remedy the sleepiness and interleukin-6 levels—it did not help their performance on the attention test. “We were surprised that performance did not return to prerestriction levels,” says study author Alexandros Vgontzas, MD, professor of psychiatry at Penn State.
But if two nights of recovery isn’t enough, what can we do—short of quitting your job and ditching all of your time-sucking commitments? “Napping helps,” says Dr. Vgontzas, who previously discovered that a two-hour midafternoon nap can improve all the above factors after a night of restricted sleep. (Here's how to power nap for productivity—even at work.) As for the long term, Dr. Vgontzas and his team can only assume that repeated cycles of restriction and recovery are harmful, meaning it's in your best interest to do what you can to set an early bedtime and keep it.
More from Prevention: 10 Reasons You Can't Sleep
Nina Elias is a Syracuse University graduate (Go Orange!) with a love for natural beauty, Broadway, brain health, and the eternal search for the perfect bedroom paint color. She resides in beautiful Bethlehem, PA.
