Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here good news for people who use their days off as they are intended to rest up after a busy week. It turns out those compensatory zas are far more beneficial than previously thought, according to a Swedish study published in in April issue of the Journal of
Sleep Research. The study looked at more than forty three thousand people who participated in the Swedish National March cohort, which began in follow up for every subject continued until they died, moved away, or December, when the study officially closed. The researchers for the sleep study pulled relevant data from the cohort questionnaire about basic sleep habits, like how many hours approximately participants sleep on a workday night, as well as how many hours they snooze per night on days
off of work. Response increments ranged from less than five hours to greater than nine hours. Previous studies have shown that people who consistently sleep too little short sleep is defined as five hours or less a night, or too much long sleep is nine or more hours per night, have higher mortality rates than people who fall into the Goldilocks zone in between getting just the right amount of
sleep every night. However, the authors of the study point out that few, if any, of those studies have asked participants to differentiate between week day and weekend sleep, which makes a big difference, they wrote, in the current study, because there are five week days and two weekend days, it is likely that self reports of typical sleep duration
more strongly reflect weekday sleep. Thus, it is of interest to investigate the relationship between weekend sleep duration and mortality, as well as the different patterns of sleep duration between week day and weekend sleep. When the researchers looked at all of the data, findings were consistent with previous conclusions of increased mortality if both week day and weekend sleep are short or when both are long. However, they wrote, when weekend sleep is extended after short weekday sleep, no
association with mortality is seen. We suggest that this may reflect positive effects of compensatory sleep. Experts have long advised people to get up at the same time each day, even on weekends, as a long term strategy for getting better sleep each night. The theory is that yo yoing sleep habits disturb your circadian rhythms. Dr David Ding's was not involved in this sleep study, but he's the chief of the Division of Sleep in Chronobiology at the University
of Pennsylvania Perlman School of Medicine. He told Time Magazine, the real question is whether there is in fact a build up of deficit or biological changes that are gradual over time, even though you get recovery sleep. So while this study is great news for those of us who like to sleep in on days off, many sleep experts say more studies need to be done on this subject. Today's episode was written by Alia Hoyt and produced by
Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics that may or may not reinforce your current habits, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.