Weekend lie-in not a healthy sleep option

HAVING a lie-in at the weekend won’t make up for sleep lost during the week, experts have warned.

The extra kip doesn’t help recharge your health after a week of burning the candle at both ends. Not getting enough sleep can be detrimental to your health.

The gold standard when it comes to shut-eye is eight hours a night. But less than that and you run the risk of falling ill with colds and flu, up your chances of obesity and type 2 diabetes and risk your mental wellbeing.

So, it can be tempting to set the alarm a little later on a Saturday or Sunday, in the hope of making up for lost time. But the new findings, from the University of Colorado Boulder, show that might not work.

Kenneth Wright, director of their sleep lab, warned: “Our findings suggest that the common behaviour of burning the candle during the week and trying to make up for it on the weekend is not an effective health strategy.

“It could be that the yo-yoing back and forth – changing the time we eat, changing our circadian clock and then going back to insufficient sleep – is uniquely disruptive.”

Scientists found that those people who slept no more than five hours for five days, before two days of sleeping as long as they liked, gained next to nothing compared to those who followed a longer, more structured sleeping pattern.

The results indicated that people who sleep in on the weekend can benefit from a mild recovery but the effects wear off as soon as they go back to their normal patterns during the working week.