What if we told you that you can catch up on sleep and fix your sleep hygiene? The existing research is all over the map, but at least we have allies in the fight to catch up on sleep like Dr. Alex Dimitriu. The only problem with his method is that your sleep debt (the number of hours you’ve lost) can’t exceed the number of hours you sleep per night. 😴
“If the sleep debt is greater, the time to recover becomes markedly longer, and complete recovery may not be possible,” he explains. “So, it’s important to not let sleep debt go too far.”
Head of Healthcare Leadership at Stellenbosch Business School, Professor Renata Schoeman, has a more local understanding of the missing Zzs in Mzansi, and tells us that sleep is extremely important, not only from a physical health perspective, but also a mental health one.
“It [sleep deprivation] makes us unable to manage the day well and can put you at risk for mental health disorder if it’s chronic. It can also put you at elevated risk for both depression and relapse in an existing bipolar disorder. What we see in private practice is that 80 percent of people who come in saying they have ADHD, it’s actually chronic sleep deprivation.”
Schoeman says seven to nine hours is the magic nighttime number.
Slaying your sleep debt could eliminate health risks like obesity and cardiovascular diseases. On the other hand, not getting enough sleep could put you at a 33 percent increased risk for dementia, according to John Hopkins sleep researcher Patrick Finan. Now go and take a nap.
So how do you catch up on sleep?
A study has suggested that for every one hour of sleep debt, a person would need four consistent nights of seven to nine hours of sleep to recover.
If you’re generationally sleep bankrupt like us, it’s time to reach for the melatonin before it’s too late.
Tshego is a writer and law student from Pretoria. A keen follower of social media trends, his interests include high fantasy media, politics, science, talk radio, reading and listening to music.
He is also probably one of the only people left who still play Pokemon Go.
