Sleeping In On The Weekends Actually Makes You More Tired
As a working girl, you know that weekends are reserved for quality time with your bae, otherwise known as your bed.
Finally, on Saturday and Sunday morning, you can experience the bliss of not waking up to a crappy iPhone ringtone and hitting the snooze button three times in between dreams of Justin Bieber riding a tiger.
But then Monday morning comes around, and even though you slept until 2 p.m. on Sunday, you feel like shit. Why?
Turns out, sleeping in can actually make your more tired the next day, so we’re all fucked.
You can’t “catch up” on lost sleep, explained Michael J. Breus, a clinical psychologist and fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, to Broadly.
“It doesn’t really work that way,” Breus says. “Sleep is lot like a baseball game. If the game starts at 8 o’clock and you show up at 9:30, they don’t restart the game. And also when the game is over—you staying at the ballpark, you’re not going to see anything.”
Okay, not sure about that baseball game analogy. But think of it like a Rihanna concert or something instead. Either way, the whole “I’m sleeping in this weekend because I got no sleep all week” excuse is actually a detriment to your sleeping pattern.
Breus explained to Broadly that sleeping in on the weekends after waking up early all week puts your body into a similar predicament to jet-lag, even if it’s only for a few hours, which is probably why you always feel so shitty on Monday.
But what if you spent all of Friday night partying and didn’t leave the club until 5 a.m.? Breus says that you should still try to wake up at your regular time.
“The wake-up is really what is the anchor of your circadian rhythm,” he explains. “Getting light in the morning … restarts it, if you will, and that’s what you’re trying to accomplish.”
So even if you may feel like shit after going to bed at 4 and waking up at 8, you’ll feel better the next day. Plus, if you’ve ever tried it, you may notice that getting only a few hours of sleep is okay if you only do it once in a while.
It’s when you continually don’t get enough sleep that you really start to get fucked up. But the solution isn’t sleeping later, according to Breus, it’s going to bed earlier. Easier said than done, right? But either way, here’s a little bit of motivation to stop sleeping in so hard on the weekends, even if you’re staying up until sunrise the night before.
