Catching up on sleep during weekend
Credit to Author: Tempo Desk| Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2019 16:10:36 +0000
NAPOLEON only slept for 4 hours every day. He slept 12am to 2 am and then from 5 am to 7 am. Despite his short sleep hours, he seemed to enjoy napping and was able to energize himself within just half an hour. Genius Einstein slept for 10 hours during the night and would have daytime naps. Workaholic Winston Churchill slept 5-6 hours during the night and took several power naps in the day, ranging 1.5-2 hours.
Some people can feel alright after only six hours, while others are sluggish unless they have nine. Medical evidence suggests that for optimum health and function, the average adult should get seven to nine hours of sleep daily though it may vary depending on genetics, lifestyle and health conditions.
People can cut their sleep time for work and social reasons. Mostly they try to recover over the weekends. A new study in “Current Biology” suggests sleeping longer over the weekend can’t reverse the negative health effects of losing sleep during the week.
“What we wanted to do in this study was to look at the common behavior of not getting enough sleep during the school or work week and then sleeping in and trying to catch up on the weekend”, says Kenneth Wright, lead author of the paper. “We wanted to see whether or not the common strategy was beneficial for your metabolic health.” Risk factors like, insulin sensitivity and weight gain persisted in sleep-restricted participants, even after a weekend of unlimited slumber. But not all hope is lost for struggling sleepers. Wright says that daily naps have been shown to increase physical performance in people who don’t get enough nighttime sleep, but their effect on metabolic health is still up in the air.
(To be continued)