According to a new study, it can take more than a week to recover from memory and reaction speed problems that develop after 10 days of poor quality sleep.
To find out if it is possible to recover from sleep deprivation and, if so, how long it takes, a team from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, recruited 13 volunteers to suffer ten nights of broken and poor quality sleep. .
During these ten nights, and a subsequent week of uninterrupted, quality sleep, volunteers answered questions, wore wrist sensors, and had daily EEG tests.
After the week of good sleep, the volunteers’ reaction rates had returned to normal, but memory and other previous sleep deprivation functions were even slower.
Jeremi Ochab, lead author, said previous studies had explored the impact of sleep deprivation, but this was the first to show that it takes more than a week of solid sleep to achieve reaction time and recovery. memory to return to normal levels.
According to a new study, it can take more than a week to recover from memory and reaction speed problems that develop after 10 days of poor quality sleep. Stock image
Sleep deprivation is not a new phenomenon, but researchers say it seems to be becoming more common in the modern world.
Loss of sleep, especially for prolonged periods, can cause changes in circadian rhythm, loss of alertness, decreased attention span, and memory problems.
Understanding whether and how the human brain recovers from chronic sleep loss is important not only from a scientific perspective, but also from public health ‘, according to the Polish team.
In addition to sleep monitors and EEG tests, study volunteers performed a series of reaction and memory tests, as well as answering questions.
Initially there were 23 hired, but due to some abandonments and others that did not adhere to the bad sleep routine, there were only 13 left to provide useful data.
Of these 12 were women and one was male, with an average age of 21 years.
Study volunteers slept in their home, not in a bedroom, during the 21-day experiment, and they were all healthy.
During the 21 days, the volunteers spent the first four days normally, sleeping as they normally would, followed by 10 days of “chronic partial sleep,” which is 30% of what someone would normally need. They finally had a solid week of sleep.
Throughout the experiment, the researchers continuously measured spontaneous locomotor activity and performed them using EEG measurements.
They measured how long the volunteers rested and performed different tasks, reaction time and accuracy, and brain waves through the EEG.
“We observed a unanimous deterioration of all measures during sleep restriction,” the team explained, confirming that the volunteers performed poorly with less sleep.
“Other results indicate that a week of recovery after prolonged periods of sleep restriction is insufficient to fully recover.”
After seven days of recovery, participants had not yet returned to pre-sleep deprivation performance in most operating measures. Only their reaction times had recovered to initial levels, ”the team added.
They hope to continue their experiments with a wider group of volunteers in the future, as well as investigate longer recovery periods.
This would allow them to unravel the order in which the different brain functions return to normal, as some had not returned completely after seven days of good sleep.
Because they stopped research after a week of good sleep, they are currently unable to pinpoint when other functions, such as memory usage, returned completely to normal.
To find out if it is possible to recover from sleep deprivation and, if so, how long it takes, a team from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, recruited volunteers to suffer ten nights of broken and poor quality sleep. Stock image
The authors add: “Research into the recovery process after a long period of sleep restriction reveals that differences in behavioral, motor, and neurophysiological responses to both sleep loss and recovery.”
This is in addition to previous studies that showed that a lot of quality sleep is needed to compensate for prolonged periods of broken or poor quality sleep.
An earlier study, published in August, found that a 30-minute half-day nap can’t make up for not sleeping well the night before.
Michigan State University experts measured the extent to which sleep deprivation caused cognitive impairment and found that short naps are only associated with a slight relief from sleep deprivation, and only if you sleep soundly.
There were other limitations in the Polish study, including those of caffeine consumption, with volunteers initially indicated to avoid drinking coffee during the 21-day experiment.
“But due to the nature of the study and the prolonged period of sleep deprivation, they reported that they might not be able to meet the study’s expectations and avoid napping,” the authors explained.
“Therefore, we decided that caffeine consumption was allowed for participants to complete the study according to the prescribed schedule, but no amounts of caffeinated beverages were recorded.
“In addition, we have learned that caffeine appears to have limited efficacy in maintaining vigilance during prolonged sleep restriction.”
The findings of the Polish study on sleep recovery were published in the journal PLOS One.