It can take up to four days to recover from an hour of sleep debt and nine days or more to fully recover from a significant deficit.
If a person has sleep deprivation, they can recover by getting sufficient quality sleep. However, when sleep deprivation is severe or has lasted a long time, it can take multiple nights — or even up to a week — for a person to recover.
If you have built up sleep debt, allow extra time for sleep: go to bed early. You sleep more deeply when you are sleep deprived, so you do not need to “pay back” hour for hour the lost sleep. However, if you have not had enough sleep for many days, it might take several nights of good-quality sleep to recover.
“The current study suggests that 7-day recovery following 10-day sleep restriction is sufficient only for the reaction speed to reverse to baseline, while the other behavioral, locomotor, and neurophysiological measures do not show such improvement.”
At a more advanced level, sleep deprivation can over-stimulate parts of the brain and even lead to permanent brain damage, according to a report on sleep deprivation among students published by The Guardian. “This is because of the brain's 'neural plasticity' – which means its ability to adapt to new situations.
Napping can both help and hurt sleep debt. If you didn't get enough sleep the night before, a nap can help you feel less sluggish during the day. Keep your naps short. Aim for 10 to 20 minutes.
Feeling extremely tired during the day is one of the hallmark symptoms of sleep deprivation. People with excessive daytime sleepiness may feel drowsy and have a hard time staying awake even when they need to. In some cases, this results in microsleeps. View Source in which a person dozes off for a few seconds.
Sleep deprivation makes us moody and irritable, and impairs brain functions such as memory and decision-making. It also negatively impacts the rest of the body – it impairs the functioning of the immune system, for example, making us more susceptible to infection.
Sleep deprivation increases your risk for health problems (even ones you have never experienced), such as disturbed mood, gastrointestinal symptoms (abdominal pain, gas, diarrhea, constipation, nausea, vomiting), headaches and joint pain, blood sugar and insulin system disruption, high blood pressure, seizures, and ...
Chronic Sleep Debt
This is the kind of sleep deprivation caused by years of insufficient sleep that's never paid back. For example, if you spent years getting only six hours of sleep per night when your body needed 8.5 hours per night, you'd have chronic sleep debt or be chronically sleep deprived.
In the simplest terms, chronic sleep deprivation refers to the case of getting insufficient sleep or experiencing sleeplessness over an extended period of time.
Also, an estimated 50 to 70 million Americans have chronic, or ongoing, sleep disorders. Sleep deficiency can lead to physical and mental health problems, injuries, loss of productivity, and even a greater likelihood of death.
Less than seven to eight hours of sleep can be harmful to human health. Getting less than adequate sleep is known as sleep deprivation [5]. When an individual has multiple consecutive days of sleep deprivation, they enter “sleep debt,” which is a cumulative effect of insufficient sleep for any period of time [6].
While some people regularly function on short periods of sleep, research mostly agrees that six hours of sleep is not enough for most adults. Experts recommend that most adults need at least seven hours of sleep every night.
Five hours of sleep is better than none. But five hours of sleep isn't enough sleep in the long term. Most of us need about eight hours of sleep, and only getting five hours can lead to sleep deprivation, low energy, poor focus, and long-term health issues.
The researchers measured close to 7,000 synapses in all. Their images show that synapses grew stronger and larger as these nocturnal mice scurried about at night. Then, after 6 to 8 hours of sleep during the day, those synapses shrank by about 18 percent as the brain reset for another night of activity.
While insomnia can be a symptom of psychiatric disorders, like anxiety and depression, it is now recognized that sleep problems can also contribute to the onset and worsening of different mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and even suicidal ideation.
The cumulative long-term effects of sleep loss and sleep disorders have been associated with a wide range of deleterious health consequences including an increased risk of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, heart attack, and stroke.
Sleep Debt Can Cause Unusual Anxiety Problems
Sleep debt can cause increased anxiety even in those that do not experience anxiety regularly. When you don't get enough sleep, several issues affect your body that can ultimately lead to trouble with anxiety and stress.