I’m assuming that if I lose two hours of sleep for five non-consecutive days that I won’t have to sleep for ten hours straight in addition to the eight-ish I’d normally be asleep for. How well does the body keep track of this stuff? How much will it forgive?
Bear with me as I’m not thinking super clearly from the caffeine crash and messed-up sleep
Sleep debt itself is a weird metric. You can’t “pay it back”, lost sleep is lost sleep, period.
The body doesn’t keep track, the body just complains. You might feel weird if there is a dramatic change to your sleep schedule.
So what we’re really talking about here is not sleep debt, but rather, sleep loss.
Honestly one could probably make a comparison to a loan shark, you keep paying it off but the interest is so high and you keep borrowing more you just stay in debt and keep sinking deeper.