One way to calculate your sleep debt is to track the nights you're getting less than 7 hours of sleep. Then add up how much less sleep you got every day. So if you're only getting 6 hours of sleep Monday through Friday, by the weekend you've built up a debt of 5 hours.
Common sleep debt symptoms include excessive daytime sleepiness, reduced attention span, slow reflexes, impaired productivity, a weakened immune system, and poor mood the next day. Over time, your overall health deteriorates and exposes you to an increased risk of chronic illnesses.
It's cumulative, meaning that if you regularly get less sleep than you should, you're going to have more sleep debt. For instance, if you get four hours of sleep when you should be getting eight, you'll have a sleep debt of four hours. If you do this for the next seven days, you'll end up with a sleep debt of 28 hours.
At Rise, we recommend keeping your sleep debt under five hours to maintain daytime energy levels that are up where you need them to be. At less than five hours of sleep debt, most people can still feel good and perform at their best.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers less than seven hours per night to be short sleep. View Source , which means for most people, six hours of sleep is not enough.
Unfortunately, most people cannot have a healthy lifestyle with only four hours of sleep, research suggests. However, personal and anecdotal evidence supporting shorter sleep by using polyphasic sleep suggests otherwise. This means that we cannot say for sure if you can thrive on four hours of sleep.
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.
Research has shown that it can take up to four days to recover from one hour of lost sleep and up to nine days to completely eliminate sleep debt. View Source . A full recovery from sleep debt returns our body to its baseline, reducing the negative effects associated with sleep loss.
The term sleep deprivation refers to getting less than the needed amount of sleep, which, for adults, is at least seven hours. View Source . Children and teens need even more nightly sleep than adults.
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.
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.
Naps are a temporary help to improve alertness, not a replacement for getting regular, adequate sleep at night.
The Dangers of Sleeping Only 3 Hours
One major side effect may be a decrease in cognitive function and proper decision-making. This could lead to accidents, irritability, depression, or memory loss. There could be multiple physical ramifications caused by sleep deprivation as well.
You may experience a reduced reaction time, poor memory, poor concentration, and irritability. However, there are claims that two hours could be too much sleep when deciding whether to have two hours or nothing at all.
Idiopathic Hypersomnia
This sleep disorder is characterized by difficulty waking. View Source , excessive sleepiness, and the inability to feel rested after sleeping at night or napping during the day. With this disorder, you may sleep as much as 14 to 18 hours a day.
Sleeping a lot isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sleep is important. Not getting enough sleep puts you at risk for health problems, from heart disease to obesity to diabetes. However, sleeping a lot all of a sudden when you didn't before might be a reason to look closely at what is going on with your health.
No, 5 hours of sleep isn't enough once a week. For optimum energy levels, good health, and maximum performance, you need to meet your individual sleep need each night — which is most likely more than five hours.
Elon Musk says he's upped his sleep to 6 hours per night—and that his old routine hurt his brain. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks with CNBC on May 16th, 2023. Elon Musk says his days of trying to sleep less and work more are over — at least, relatively speaking.
We do not recommend sleeping for only one hour at night. Some research suggests that lost sleep can take years off your life and that you may not be able to catch up on the lost hours of rest. This is because consistent sleep deprivation can cause a myriad of chronic health issues in people over time.