Sleep Banking
CNN Health interviewed me about “sleep banking,” when people sleep extra before anticipated sleep deprivation.
Unfortunately, we can’t “bank” or save up sleep. Just like we can’t pre-clean the kitchen so we have to do it every day, we can’t pre-sleep.
What we can do is pay back some of the chronic sleep debt that most of us tend to carry around… A study where people were given 12-16 hours to sleep each night, showed that it takes about a week to pay off average sleep debt, but after that people simply cannot sleep ahead extra. (Klerman 2021).
Still, it is worth paying off sleep debt if you can, so especially if you have some sleep deprivation coming up, get to bed earlier to catch some extra ZZZs!
