Experts Now Say It’s Okay To Sleep In On Weekends
We all know how important sleep is for our health and well-being, but a third of adults still sleep less than the expert’s recommended amount. But a new recommendation from the National Sleep Foundation can help people make up for lost sleep and stop accumulating sleep debt.
Earlier this month, a team of 12 sleep doctors and experts reviewed 63 studies to help them come up with best practices for sleep. What they determined is that sleeping in for one or two hours on days you’re not working – like weekends – can help you catch up on sleep missed during the work week. While a lot of us were already doing that, it wasn’t recommended by sleep experts before. Previously, they didn’t advise sleeping in because having a consistent routine of going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time every single day was thought to be more important.
Now they’re saying that while the timing of sleep is “extremely important,” consistently getting less than seven hours is a bigger issue that can be alleviated by sleeping in a little. “Sometimes going off schedule by a couple of hours is less disruptive than persistently not getting enough sleep,” says sleep psychologist Jade Wu. The thing is, we really need to limit it to only sleeping in for one or two hours, otherwise the experts say it’ll be harder to build a regular sleep routine.
