Opening Up a Sleep Savings Account
Researchers Say You Can Save Your Sleep for Later
Need to pull an all-nighter but don't know how you're going to pull it off? Researchers say you can "bank" sleep for later use.
The dreaded all-nighter. Virtually every college-aged adult has experienced at least one of these, burning the midnight oil to finish a paper, cram for a test, or prepare an oral presentation.
While the occasional all-nighter is something most of us have experienced, that knowledge doesn’t make them any easier to bear. The experience can be hellacious, and the effects are long lasting, as our internal body clocks are thrown out of whack several days after the fact.
Well researchers think there may be a way to make these all-nighters more tolerable. How? By saving up sleep time. That is to say that if you know ahead of time that an all-nighter is on the horizon, sleeping longer in the run-up to that all-nighter can make it less tiresome.
In short, just as state governments have rainy day funds—where states set aside excess revenue so it can be spent for an emergency—people can develop their own “sleepy day funds.”
Researchers discovered this after recruiting participants to take part in a sleep experiment. Half of the participants were asked to change their sleeping patterns slightly so that they would sleep longer (e.g. going to bed earlier than normal and waking up later than normal) for a full week. The other half were instructed to keep their sleeping patterns as close to normal as possible.
The next week, all of the participants slept for no more than three hours per night.
Putting the participants through various physical and mental tasks that assessed their mental sharpness and physical dexterity, the researchers found that those who slept longer “were more resilient during sleep restriction.”
“They showed less performance deterioration with regards to reaction time and alertness than the group that had been given the habitual prior sleep,” said Tracy Rupp to the BBC News. Rupp was the study’s lead researcher, hailing from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
As much as we know that the body needs sleep, no one really knows why. Similarly, the researchers don’t know just why the brain is able to “bank” or “save” sleep for those difficult days. They’re also not sure how much sleep is enough for making all-nighters more bearable.
It’s fitting that this research comes from a branch of the military. Training often requires soldiers to put their body through extreme physical demands on little sleep. In the course of Navy Seals’ basic training, for example, recruits go through several weeks of rigorous physical and mental training. One of those weeks—appropriately dubbed Hell Week—recruits must do all their training on no more than four hours of sleep!
With any luck, further research will enable Navy Seals to “bank” their sleep in preparation for Hell Week. But further research will be beneficial to every one of us—students, parents, and 9 to 5’ers alike—to better endure those long days at class, nights with our sick-as-a-dog kids, or evenings spent at the office.
Source:
news.bbc.co.uk
newsmaxhealth.com
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Posted: February 21st, 2010 under Sleep.
Tags: all nighter, all-nighters, allnighters, how to stay awake all night
