The good news is that we can catch up on lost sleep. The bad news is that the catching up has to be done fairly quickly after the loss. Harvard Magazine reports that researchers at the Harvard Medical School monitored nine young men and women who spent three weeks on 5.6 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. When the study participants were awake, they took a computer-based test
of reaction time and sustained attention every four hours.To their surprise, the researchers found that even though people were staying awake for almost 33 hours, when they had
the opportunity to sleep for 10 hours, their performance shortly after
waking was back to normal. But the scientists also found that the longer term sleep deficit–a deficit acquired over a period of weeks, combined with single all-nighter– dramatically increased the participants' impairment. So how long does it take to overcome a long-term sleep debt? The researchers don't know, but their results, they say, suggest that it could take weeks.
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I have been suffering from Fragmented Sleep and Sleep Deprivation for 36-years, driving trucks cross country and elsewhere. Average about 6-hrs sleep loss per night at least 50% of that time. How long would it take me to recoup my loss sleep?
So 5.6 hours of sleep in 24 hours is “sleep deprived”?
Yikes. Hate to see the impact on workers of consistent 12 to 24 hour shifts like firefighters, nurses, and resident physicians that can average less sleep than that.