In simple terms, sleep debt is the difference between how much sleep your body needs and how much you actually get each night. But it doesn’t build up overnight. When you repeatedly sleep less than your body requires, the effect adds up — and this cumulative shortfall is what we call sleep debt.

Interestingly, your body doesn’t always respond to sleep loss with obvious signs like fatigue or irritability. Sometimes, it adapts and starts functioning on less sleep. You may feel like you’re managing fine, but behind the scenes, your body is paying the price. Crucial internal processes — like healing, repair, and recovery — start to slow down, eventually affecting both your physical and mental health.

• Lack of sleep affects your ability to think, learn and process daily events around you
• You tend to be a lot more moody
• Your body does not heal from within – you’re compromising on all the repair mechanisms your body carries out during sleep
• Your immune system efficiency gets hit
• It alters the leptin-ghrelin hunger hormone balance, making you eat more thus leading to weight gain (more on this next week!)
• Disrupts your body’s circadian rhythm
• Most importantly, you experience microsleep during the day – it is when you doze off for a few seconds at random times of day. Imagine if that happened when you were driving!

Studies say that 1 hour of sleep debt takes you 4 days to recover from, physiologically. Ideally, the easiest and the only way to repay sleep debt is to not be in one. However, since most of us are already deep in debt, here is how we can try to repay it.

• Take that afternoon power nap. (read my previous post to understand how, when and how much)
• Be consistent with your sleep hygiene to ensure good quality night sleep
• If you have slept less the last few days due to work/family commitments, get back to your routine sleeping pattern as soon as possible

The truth is, sleeping extra might make up for the lost hours theoretically, but the dysregulation lack of sleep has caused within your body won’t go away unless you consistently sleep well at night. There is no replacement to the recovery and healing that happens with a good night’s sleep.