How to sleep on the weekend without harm to health?

Most peo­ple look for­ward to the week­end, and not at all in order to devote these days to their favorite hob­bies, walks and out­door activ­i­ties. And in order to final­ly sleep for real, until it stops, until the body itself wants to get out of bed. But doc­tors and sci­en­tists say that liv­ing in a mode of lack of sleep on week­days and pro­longed sleep on week­ends is unhealthy.

Med­AboutMe under­stood the nuances of this prob­lem.

Sleep debt

Accord­ing to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC), one in three adults in the Unit­ed States does not meet the rec­om­mend­ed amount of sleep rec­om­mend­ed by doc­tors, which is at least 7 hours a day. Most often, the rea­son for this is work­load, numer­ous stress­es, and the pecu­liar­i­ties of life in big cities.

At the same time, reg­u­lar lack of sleep is known to be asso­ci­at­ed with an increased risk of obe­si­ty, dia­betes and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease. And a recent study by doc­tors from Brigham and Wom­en’s Hos­pi­tal showed that reg­u­lar sleep of less than 6 hours a day leads to a dete­ri­o­ra­tion in con­cen­tra­tion by 5 times, to an increase in reac­tion time by 2 times, and in gen­er­al there are prob­lems with solv­ing tasks designed for log­ic, com­pared to peo­ple who got 7 or more hours of sleep dai­ly. More­over, these effects occur even if a per­son does not feel tired and believes that he is work­ing effec­tive­ly.

At the same time, a huge num­ber of peo­ple work­ing in the 5/2 mode fly on week­days as “larks”, forc­ing them­selves to get up at 5–7 in the morn­ing, and “owls” live on week­ends, going to bed on Fri­day well after mid­night and get­ting up on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day at lunch area. This is a kind of attempt to com­pen­sate for chron­ic lack of sleep, which affects a sig­nif­i­cant part of work­ing cit­i­zens. But is it pos­si­ble to give back the sleep debt accu­mu­lat­ed over the week to your body?

Alas, if cred­it card debt can be closed at the touch of a but­ton, debt to one­self for sleep­ing one or even two days of stay­ing in bed “all the way” can­not be closed. Accord­ing to doc­tors, in order to ful­ly com­pen­sate for reg­u­lar lack of sleep, you need to sleep the pre­scribed 7–8 hours of sleep every day for 1–2 weeks — only then all the neg­a­tive con­se­quences of chron­ic sleep defi­cien­cy will be elim­i­nat­ed.

Hormones and lack of sleep

In Feb­ru­ary 2019, sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado pub­lished the results of a sim­ple exper­i­ment that aimed to find out if a long week­end nap can com­pen­sate for sleep depri­va­tion dur­ing the work week. A group of 36 young healthy peo­ple were divid­ed into three groups:

• those who slept only 5 hours a day — both on week­days and on week­ends;
• those who slept for 5 hours on week­days slept to the lim­it on week­ends and then slept again for 5 hours. An impor­tant point: this group “walked” until mid­night or even until one in the morn­ing on Fri­days and Sat­ur­days, and the next morn­ing, the sub­jects slept until 11 am or noon (as peo­ple usu­al­ly do when work­ing in 5/2 mode). Over­all, over the week­end, they gained only 1.1 hours more than their bod­ies need­ed;
• the con­trol group includ­ed peo­ple who got the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sleep for 8 hours every night — both on week­days and on week­ends.

It turned out that peo­ple who were forced to sleep deprived reg­u­lar­ly snacked in the evenings, which gave them extra calo­ries and led to weight gain. True, those who slept on week­ends did it less often, so they gained weight less inten­sive­ly. But still, both the first and sec­ond groups gained weight by an aver­age of 1.5 kg dur­ing the exper­i­ment. That is, the sci­en­tists con­clud­ed, even the abil­i­ty to sleep on week­ends does not elim­i­nate the increased risk of obe­si­ty.

Where does the crav­ing for food with lack of sleep come from? It’s all about the hor­mones that con­trol hunger. For exam­ple, in lep­tin: dur­ing the work week, both sleep-deprived groups reg­u­lar­ly arranged evening addi­tion­al snacks of 400–650 kcal, which includ­ed yogurt, chips and pas­tries.

Blood tests of the par­tic­i­pants in the exper­i­ment showed that peo­ple who did not get enough sleep also had reduced insulin sen­si­tiv­i­ty — about 13% low­er than peo­ple who got enough sleep every day. But reduced insulin sen­si­tiv­i­ty is the road to devel­op­ing resis­tance to this impor­tant hor­mone and, as a result, a direct path to dia­betes.

More­over, it turned out that sleep­ing on week­ends is more harm­ful for the body than con­stant­ly suf­fer­ing from lack of sleep. For those who slept on Sat­ur­days and Sun­days, insulin sen­si­tiv­i­ty fell by 27% for the liv­er and mus­cles, that is, jumps in sleep dura­tion between week­days and week­ends are hor­mon­al­ly more harm­ful to the body than sta­ble lack of sleep with­out the abil­i­ty to com­pen­sate for it for week­end.

Expert com­ment

Endocri­nol­o­gist, Pro­fes­sor Peter Liu, David Gef­fen School of Med­i­cine at UCLA

Sleep is one of the three pil­lars of a healthy lifestyle, along with exer­cise and prop­er nutri­tion. You would­n’t tell any­one, “You can diet Mon­day through Fri­day, but eat what­ev­er you want on week­ends.” The same prin­ci­ple holds true for sleep.

social jetlag

There is anoth­er prob­lem of chang­ing sleep dura­tion, and it is called “social jet lag”. When we fly from one time zone to anoth­er, we also suf­fer from jet lag — the body has to urgent­ly rearrange cir­ca­di­an rhythms to shift day and night, and the greater the dif­fer­ence between time zones, the more the body suf­fers.

Rough­ly the same thing hap­pens at the end of the week, when we abrupt­ly switch from one mode to anoth­er — even if the dura­tion of sleep remains nor­mal and does not change! For exam­ple, if on week­days a per­son slept from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. (the mid­dle of sleep was at 3 a.m.), and on week­ends he lives accord­ing to the sched­ule “sleep from 2 a.m. to 10 a.m.” (the mid­dle of sleep falls at 6 a.m.), then we get a shift of the usu­al mode by 3 hours.

Cal­cu­la­tions by experts from the Asso­ci­at­ed Pro­fes­sion­al Sleep Soci­ety showed that every hour of such a regime shift increas­es the risk of devel­op­ing car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease by 11%, and also increas­es the like­li­hood of devel­op­ing depres­sion, chron­ic sleepi­ness and fatigue.

An inter­est­ing point: sci­en­tists point out the impor­tance of main­tain­ing the mid­point of sleep. In their opin­ion, to avoid social jet­lag at the week­end, it is enough to stick to this point. That is, on week­ends, go to bed a lit­tle ear­li­er, and get up a lit­tle lat­er. Thus, you will be able to stay in your tem­po­rary mode and make up for the hours of sleep you missed dur­ing the week.

Still, it’s better to sleep than not to sleep!

Well, it turns out that sleep on the week­end can be use­less and even harm­ful? No. Swedish sci­en­tists from the Karolin­s­ka Insti­tutet in Stock­holm still proved its ben­e­fits. Over the course of 13 years, they observed 43 thou­sand adults — they assessed their sleep, health sta­tus and record­ed mor­tal­i­ty.

It turned out that adults under 65 who con­sis­tent­ly got 5 or less hours of sleep were 65% more like­ly to die pre­ma­ture­ly than those who slept at least 6–7 hours per night. We add that sleep last­ing 8 hours or more also increased the risk of ear­ly death — by 25%. And those who slept lit­tle on week­days, but slept off on the week­ends, did not fall into the group of those dying ahead of time and, accord­ing to this indi­ca­tor, were equat­ed to those who slept 6–7 hours every day.

So in terms of life expectan­cy, the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sleep on the week­end is price­less when it comes to chron­ic sleep depri­va­tion dur­ing the work week.