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
I remember reading somewhere that the maximum amount of sleep debt that you can accumulate is something on the neighborhood of 20 hours.
Basically, by the time you have rested up 20 hours, whatever excess of sleep debt you had over that will be erased along with it.
That’s not to say that sleeping an extra 20 hours in a single go is a good or achievable thing, or that it would somehow magically undo all of the accumulated fatigue and wear from denying yourself that much sleep over that long of a time period.
Only that by the time you have accumulated an additional 20 hours of sleep by sleeping like an extra hour a day for three weeks that physiologically, there would be no continued improvement in your functioning by continuing to sleep extra.
I mean, as far as it actually goes, you have have slept enough, then you have have not slept enough, and that goes through a range of a “little tired” to “dead”.