After two weeks of getting 6 hours of sleep per night, individuals have the same reaction time as somebody who has been awake for 24 hours, which is approximately equivalent to an individual with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10%. After two weeks of getting 4 hours of sleep per night, individuals have the same reaction time as somebody who has been awake for 48-72 hours.
The process of recovery also seems to be much slower after chronic sleep restriction, although it has not yet been well quantified. For chronic sleep restriction, there seems to be a much closer to one-to-one correspondence between hours of sleep lost and hours that must be paid back to return to baseline performance. Certainly, it is not possible to reverse the effects of chronic sleep restriction in a single weekend.
So, what about the effects of chronic sleep restriction on even longer timescales? What if you don't get enough sleep continually for a year, or a decade? How long would it then take you to recover? We don't know the answer to that. Laboratory studies of chronic sleep restriction cannot logistically or ethically go much longer than a month. We are therefore forced to rely on epidemiological data. We know that people who habitually get short sleep (less than about 6 hours) have higher rates of all-cause mortality, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. But we don't know how easily those long-terms outcomes can be reversed by improving sleep patterns.
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After two weeks of getting 6 hours of sleep per night, individuals have the same reaction time as somebody who has been awake for 24 hours, which is approximately equivalent to an individual with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10%. After two weeks of getting 4 hours of sleep per night, individuals have the same reaction time as somebody who has been awake for 48-72 hours.
The process of recovery also seems to be much slower after chronic sleep restriction, although it has not yet been well quantified. For chronic sleep restriction, there seems to be a much closer to one-to-one correspondence between hours of sleep lost and hours that must be paid back to return to baseline performance. Certainly, it is not possible to reverse the effects of chronic sleep restriction in a single weekend.
So, what about the effects of chronic sleep restriction on even longer timescales? What if you don't get enough sleep continually for a year, or a decade? How long would it then take you to recover? We don't know the answer to that. Laboratory studies of chronic sleep restriction cannot logistically or ethically go much longer than a month. We are therefore forced to rely on epidemiological data. We know that people who habitually get short sleep (less than about 6 hours) have higher rates of all-cause mortality, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. But we don't know how easily those long-terms outcomes can be reversed by improving sleep patterns.