Here’s another interesting yet contradictory thing thrown up by sleep research. Apparently, according to a recent US study, it’s possible to ‘bank’ sleep by sleeping more than the normal amount your body needs, in order to offset the effects of sleep deprivation later on. In other words, if you sleep nine hours a night for two days, you’ve got a spare two hours in the ‘bank,’ so to speak. If you then find yourself only sleeping six hours the next night, you shouldn’t suffer a net loss of hours, so to speak, and shouldn’t feel that tired.
Just how plausible, and how useful, is this?
Let’s have a look at how this conclusion was drawn. The study was carried out on two groups of volunteers, one of whom had extra sleep each night for a week, whilst the other just kept sleeping hours as normal. The following week, both groups were given three hours of sleep a night, and were then subjected to a batch of tests which measured their reaction times, decision-making, and other cognitive functions. The aim was to see how each group coped with the effects of sleep deprivation.
In all the tests, the ‘pre-sleepers’ were judged to have performed to a higher standard, suffering less impairment to concentration than those who did not bank sleep. This seems to suggest that they were in a better position to deal with sleep deprivation, because of this preparation.
The researchers were keen to point out how useful this could be in situations where high performance levels were needed over a long period of time, such as military operations, and it certainly does sound like it could help people in that situation, or in any job where people have to work intensely for prolonged periods of time, with opportunities for rest in between. I guess, too, that if you know your partner snores, and you’re going to lose some sleep because of it, you can plan ahead and get some extra Z’s in ahead of time.
A cautionary note, however- whilst this study did note improvement, it didn’t yet establish the reasons behind this. It’s also quite a short-term study. It’s widely known that if your sleep patterns are unstable, that can have long-term effects on your health. In other words, don’t rely on unbalanced patterns of sleep- it’s not healthy, and it will make going back to a standard sleeping pattern harder. This may be a useful trick for the times when late nights are unavoidable, but it’s still true that the best way to combat the effects of sleep deprivation, is to make sure you don’t get deprived of sleep.
Comments on this entry are closed.