If you spend ten days sleeping a third less than usual, you will hardly recover the lost sleep. In fact, even if you spent the next week sleeping without a sleep deficit, that would not be enough to correct the changes in cognitive performance and behavior produced by those ten days of incomplete sleep .
They are the conclusions that slide from a new study in this regard.
The hours of sleep are not recovered
Sleep is regulated by circadian and homeostatic processes that interact to determine the timing and duration of sleep. Loss of sleep causes disturbances of circadian rhythmicity and degradation of alertness during wakefulness, reflected in attention, cognitive efficiency and memory . Understanding whether and how the human brain recovers from chronic sleep loss is important not only from a scientific perspective but also from a public health perspective.
In the cited study it seems to be concluded that it is not easy to recover from sleep deprivation. Throughout the experiment, spontaneous locomotor activity was continuously measured by actigraphy with 1 minute resolution. On a daily basis, the subjects underwent electroencephalography measurements .
For the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, sleep deprivation is a public health epidemic . About 80% of adults report having trouble sleeping at least once a week. And furthermore, it seems that sleep debt is not only not recovered, it has health consequences if it occurs continuously.
Individual variations in sleep make it difficult to pinpoint a specific recommendation as to how much sleep an adult needs . However, most sleep researchers generally agree that seven to nine hours of sleep is ideal for optimal results in decision-making reaction time, concentration, memory, and mood.