Do you actually have to sleep in on weekends?

Someone asked me this question when I commented on an article by Arianna Huffington about chronotypes. Chronotypes means we are either night owls or early risers. Dr. Michael Breus lists four chronotypes: dolphin, leew, bear and wolf. This basically means that we all have a natural desire to wake up at different times of the day, and some people are simply more productive at the beginning of the day, while others are more productive during or toward the end of the day.

So what does the weekend have to do with this?

Many of us are chronically sleep deprived, especially teenagers. Teenagers are known to sleep little because their circadian rhythm, or internal biological clock, is changing so they are more active in the evening instead of the morning. But in the morning, school starts and then they have too little sleep. But many of us have the same problem!

We nibble away a little bit of time everywhere, a little too early because we have been out late or gone to bed too late OR because we are just in a complete, constant jet lag, because our natural biological clock tells us that we should actually sleep until 8, 9 or even 10 in the morning, then start the day and go to bed late. But because of social obligations, such as work or because we have to take our children to school, we will get up earlier. And when we do that for a long time we accumulate something called sleep debt. Sleep debt is something like getting up with a backpack in the morning and if we slept well that backpack is empty. During the day this backpack fills up with ballast and when we go to sleep that ballast is taken out of the backpack again. 

If we don't sleep enough, we wake up and already start carrying ballast in that backpack. Obviously, additional ballast is added during the day, making us increasingly tired. Unfortunately, this also affects your health. We are therefore unable to repair various things in our bodies. We are not able to balance our hormones. There are many things going on but I don't want to give you a complex. 

What is important to know, however, is that we can redeem our sleep debt, and the weekend is the perfect time for that. In fact, the weekend is the time to sleep away all the ballast from the backpack so that we are back to zero when the new week begins.

Here's the thing: It's good to go back to zero. It's certainly good to get rid of all that extra ballast! But if you sleep much longer than normal on the weekends, you end up with chronic social jet lag. Your body suddenly gets used to different times and the longer you sleep out on the weekend the harder it is to get up early again on Monday. That, of course, is not really recommended.

That's why I have this tip for you: if you want to sleep in on the weekend, I recommend staying up no more than an extra hour. Take that extra hour, but then get up! You will find that if you get up at the same time every day that your body will then automatically wake up around that time. 

For me, that moment is at 6 a.m. I am not a morning person, but I now wake up at quarter to six. Just because I am used to it, it does not mean that I am now fresh and fruity right next to bed. I just wake up around that time. But on weekends I sleep an hour longer. It may also be that I stay in bed a little longer then. What I would suggest you do instead of those absurd three to four hours of sleep on Saturday and Sunday, is to take a nap during the day, because a 20-minute nap somewhere in the day also helps to get rid of the ballast from the backpack. You don't need a complete sleep cycle (90 minutes) for that.

A nap doesn't mean you necessarily need to go to sleep. It can also mean resting. Put on your noise-canceling headphones, put on a sleep mask and just sit down somewhere. Unwind. This is also going to help you with your sleep debt.

I hope today's tip was helpful. Please let me know if there is anything else I should talk about. I always think you already know everything and of course that's not always true! Let me know what kind of topic you want me to cover and I'll make sure it gets done!

I wish you a wonderful week!

This is a blog by our guest blogger Christine Hansen. Broring and Christine work together to provide the best sleep experience for our customers.

Christine Hansen
Sleep Expert to CEOs, Executives and Successful Entrepreneurs who want to sleep but can't, Sleep Like A Boss
https://sleeplikeaboss.com/