Author: Jeremy Rehm / Source: Science News for Students
Do you use the weekends to catch up on sleep? If so, you may want to rethink that. In young adults, using weekends to catch up for lost weekday sleep can pose health risks.
These include late-night munchies, weight gain and lower sensitivity to insulin (the hormone that controls blood sugar).“The take-home message is basically that you can’t make up for [lost sleep] by sleeping a few more hours on the weekend,” says Paul Shaw, who was not involved in the study. He’s a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. “It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, if I sleep in on the weekends, I’ll be better,’” he says.
Since the 1990s, scientists have understood that missing sleep can harm someone’s health. The changes it causes can lead to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Yet in 2014, a little more than one in every three U.S. adults reported sleeping fewer than the recommended seven hours a night. That’s according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Weekends may seem like a great time to catch up on sleep. Scientists, however, weren’t sure that would work. So Christopher Depner and his colleagues decided to test it out. Depner is a sleep physiologist. He works at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The team looked at three groups of people in their mid-20s. For roughly two weeks, each group followed a set sleep schedule. One group slept about eight hours every night. Another group only got about five hours of shuteye a night. The third group snoozed some five hours each weeknight, but could sleep whenever and however much they wanted over the weekend.
That last group stayed up until midnight or 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. The following mornings, they slept in until…
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