The Hill: New research on sleep recovery suggests that one week of recovery from 10 nights of bad sleep may not be enough to get back to full functioning.
In a paper published in PLOS ONE, researchers based at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland conducted a study with healthy adults. The 23 participants were asked to wear a device on their wrist to monitor their sleep. They also underwent daily electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity and answered daily questions (Stroop tasks) that are meant to measure reaction time and accuracy.
During the experiment, the first four days were regular life to act as a baseline for comparison. Then they had 10 consecutive days of partial sleep restriction where they got 30 percent less sleep than they needed. For the final seven days, participants were allowed to sleep as much as they wanted.
“The investigation of the recovery process following an extended period of sleep restriction reveal that the differences in behavioral, motor, and neurophysiological responses to both sleep loss and recovery.”
