Study Shows It’s Hard to Catch up on Lost Sleep

November 22,2013-It’s no surprise that sleep deprivation can have a negative impact on an employee’s ability to work safely. But can workers catch up on lost sleep over the weekend to stay alert? When it comes to paying off a slept debt, a new study based on research from Penn State and three other schools offers both good news and bad news.

The study showed that recovery sleep over the weekend reverses daytime sleepiness and fatigue, but does not improve brain function.

For the study, 30 healthy, young men and women (ages 18 to 34) participated in a sleep lab experiment over 13 nights. There were 4 baseline nights with 8 hours of sleep per night, then 6 sleep-deprived nights where they only got 6 hours per night, followed by 3 recovery nights where they slept for 10 hours each night.

The study found that sleepiness increased significantly after the 6-hour nights, then returned to baseline after the recovery nights. However, brain performance deteriorated significantly after the nights with less sleep but didn’t improve after recovery sleep.

These findings have important implications for safety-critical jobs, such as healthcare workers and those in transportation. Not being at peak mental performance could put the workers, their co-workers and others in jeopardy.

hree other studies back up the research:

• A 2003 study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found recovery sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks for subjects who had only a few hours of sleep per night.
• In 2008, scientists in Stockholm, Sweden, found even after recovery sleep, study subjects still showed slight residual cognitive impairments a week later.
• ;">Another Walter Reed study found people recovered more quickly from a week of poor sleep when they had “banked” extra sleep beforehand -- nights with 10 hours of sleep.

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