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Do you use the weekends to catch up on sleep? If so, you may want to rethink that. in young adults, using weekends to catch up for lost weekday sleep can cause health risks. The take-home message is basically that you can’t make up for lost sleep by sleeping a few more hours on weekends.

Weekends may seem like a great time to catch up on sleep. Scientists, however, weren’t sure that would work. So Christopher Depner and his colleagues decided to test it out. Depner is a sleep physiologist. He works at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The team looked at three groups of people in their mid-20s. For roughly two weeks, each group followed a set sleep schedule. One group slept about eight hours every night. Another group only got about five hours of shut-eye a night. The third group snoozed (打盹) some five hours each weeknight, but could sleep whenever and however much they wanted over the weekend. That last group stayed up until midnight or I am on Friday and Saturday nights. The following mornings, they slept in until sometime between 11 am and noon. But they also stayed up late on Sunday. That left them only about six hours of snooze tine before the next workweek started. Over the whole weekend, these people got only about 1.1 hours more sleep than what their bodies needed, the researchers found.

People in the study who got too little sleep every night gained weight. So did the weekend sleep-in crowd. By the end of the experiment. people in both groups had gained an average of 1.5 kilograms.

Depner says this could be because losing sleep interferes with hormones that control hunger. Since weekend-catch-up sleepers both woke up later and went to bed later, they shifted (改变) their bodies’ internal clocks. As a result, they may have gotten hungry later. During the workweeks, both groups ate roughly 400 to 650 calories in late-night snacks.