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Sleep Recovery

Decent Essays

An emerging area of research has begun to focus on recovery processes from acute total sleep deprivation and chronic sleep restriction. Results from these studies suggest that recovery process may be slower and more complex than originally thought. Recovery appears to be affected by the type (acute versus chronic) and severity of sleep loss, recovery sleep duration and the number of days allowed for recovery and aspects of neurobehavioral functioning appear to recover at different rates. Additionally while an individual may report feeling recovered, their performance may remain impaired increasing risk for accidents and injury. It is therefore critically important to understand how much sleep people need to recover from periods of sleep loss. …show more content…

Two important sleep restriction studies that also included a short in-laboratory recovery phase were those by Dinges and colleagues11 and Belenky and colleagues.4 In the former study, sleep was restricted 33% below habitual sleep duration (average 4.98, SD 0.57 per night) for seven consecutive nights, after which participants were allowed one or two 10 hour recovery sleeps.11 In the latter, participants were permitted either 3, 5, 7 or 9 hours in bed each night, for seven nights, followed by three 8 hour recovery opportunities.4 These studies show that either two 10 hour or three 8 hour sleep opportunities were sufficient to recover performance to baseline levels. Although, participants felt that their functioning was restored with subjective reports of sleepiness and performance recovering to baseline; indicating that subjective measures do not appear to accurately parallel objective measures of neurobehavioural recovery. These findings suggest that more than 2 or 3 nights of extended sleep may be needed to return neurobehavioral functions to baseline levels. This may be especially important in situations where individuals are not able to choose or extend the length of their recovery sleep …show more content…

Importantly, it was observed that each recovery sleep dose had equivalent restorative value (i.e. linear) for sleep and objective sleepiness measures. However in contrast, recovery of neurobehavioral outcomes, sustained attention and subjective sleepiness, was exponential indicating that the restorative value of the recovery sleep doses decreased with increasing sleep

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