I’m assuming that if I lose two hours of sleep for five non-consecutive days that I won’t have to sleep for ten hours straight in addition to the eight-ish I’d normally be asleep for. How well does the body keep track of this stuff? How much will it forgive?
Bear with me as I’m not thinking super clearly from the caffeine crash and messed-up sleep
IIRC, the next line is “good night!” which really enhances this response.
If I don’t recall correctly, well… I guess I’ve added nothing and I apologize.
That really would have been better.
Sleep debt itself is a weird metric. You can’t “pay it back”, lost sleep is lost sleep, period.
The body doesn’t keep track, the body just complains. You might feel weird if there is a dramatic change to your sleep schedule.
So what we’re really talking about here is not sleep debt, but rather, sleep loss.
Honestly one could probably make a comparison to a loan shark, you keep paying it off but the interest is so high and you keep borrowing more you just stay in debt and keep sinking deeper.
That’s an apt analogy. I was just thinkin this is loss.
I don’t remember the source, but I’ve read that, while getting a good night sleep for a couple days feels much better, it takes 9 days of good sleep in a row to recover as much as you can from sleep deprivation. If I recall sleep flushes out chemicals that build up in your brain, they can only build up so much before it’s saturated, and it takes the 9 days to fully catch up on flushing them out.
It sounds like the biggest thing that would help you is managing your caffeine consumption. I went through caffeine withdrawal a few times before deciding I didn’t like it and setting the following boundaries that have helped. First, no coffee/energy drinks after 12 hours before I want to sleep. So I go to bed at 10pm, I have all my coffee drank before 10am. This gives your body a chance to process most of the caffeine so it affects your sleep less. Second (and the hardest if you’re already used to daily caffeine) I try not to drink caffeine two days in a row. This keeps it from building up in your system, which keeps your tolerance low, which also means it feels like a super power when you do drink caffeine.
