Messing With Your Biological Clock
Ah, so, you’ve been cheating yourself out of your required 7-8 hours of sleep Monday through Friday, have you? And now that the weekend’s here you’re ready to redeem those lost hours by playing “catch up,” right?
Hold up; not so fast, my friend. If you do that, you’ll wreak havoc on your biological clock which could set you up for more harm than good in the upcoming week.
Our bodies were created with an inherent rhythm, the circadian rhythm, which sets the pace for hormone production responsible for governing our transition from night to day, and then back to night again. This rhythm is determined, or set, by a number of factors, such as environmental light intensity, but it’s also a creature of habit.
If you stay up extra late on weekend nights and sleep in multiple hours later than your Monday through Friday schedule dictates, your biological clock will never know what “time zone” you live in. The result will be a life lived in continuous “jet lag” mode: difficulty falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and waking in the morning with a groggy feeling you can’t shake for hours to come.
My advice (and the advice of sleep experts) is that you maintain a sleep schedule on the weekends which closely resembles your midweek operation—give or take one hour. Beyond an hour fluctuation and your brain’s production of sleep-governing hormones will be thoroughly messed up—and so will your sleep.
Be diligent to go to bed each night 7-8 hours before you have to be up in the morning so you don’t have need to play “catch up” come the weekend. If you need some more convincing as to just how important it is for your longevity that you remain well-slept, pick up a copy of my book, Sleep Well Again. If you read it at night in bed, I truly hope it puts you to sleep!