Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to dive into,

or should I say we're going to dive back into the fascinating and even complex world of catch-up sleep.

This is one of those hot-off-the-press episodes.

Hot-off-the-press episodes are where we explore the latest, greatest,

and most striking new sleep science.

This one is fascinating, I promise. Even potentially promising,

which is, it's a rare thing for me to be promising when I'm speaking about sleep. I know.

If you've been following the podcast for a while, you'll know that the recommended sleep

duration for adults is between

7 to 9 hours each night, and that's according to the CDC and other health organizations. And notice

the emphasis on the word each night, because for many of of us that nightly sleep target is often elusive especially

during the week and it is so understandable so understandable you add up the factors of work

family obligations weekday stress and as a result, we will often

then try to make up, quote unquote, for lost sleep at the weekend. This behavior where we

short sleep during the week and then we sleep longer on the weekend is an incredibly

widespread phenomenon if you look across industrialized nations. And again, I'm not trying to

wag any fingers. I so understand it. we're all trying to balance our responsibilities with all

of the biological needs of course that we have of sleep. But the big question is this. Does this

weekend catch up sleep? Can it truly sort of pay off the sleep debt we accumulated during the week?

And can we pay down that debt every weekend without consequence?

And if anything, can it act as some kind of saving grace to de-risk what would otherwise happen if we just continued to sleep short,

nightly manner at the weekends, just as we do during the week. Some years ago to explore this,

...