Catch up on sleep the night after a sleepless night — don’t wait until the weekend

No cost at all. Those extra hour or two of sleep you make up are exactly what you’d have wanted to get anyway.

This meta-analysis involved 85,618 participants from the UK Biobank, with an average age of 61.8 years. Wrist-worn monitors tracked their daily sleep patterns over a median follow-up period of 8 years. The researchers first identified “sleep deficit nights” for each individual — nights when they got more than 2.5 hours less sleep than their personal sleep needs. The first night after such a deficit was labelled a “catch-up night”, and if participants got more sleep than required that night, it counted as a successful catch-up. Based on this, five distinct sleep patterns were identified. Compared to people with regular sleep schedules, those who were sleep-deprived and failed to catch up had a 15% higher all-cause mortality risk (HR 1.15, 95% CI 1.01–1.31). For those with a cumulative sleep deficit exceeding 3.5 hours and no catch-up, this risk rose to 42% (HR 1.42, 1.24–1.63). No significant risk elevation was found in either of the two groups that did make up their sleep deficit; for those who caught up after a moderate deficit, the HR was 1.12 (0.98–1.28). Among people who naturally get less sleep, those who were sleep-deprived and did not catch up had a 19% higher mortality risk (HR 1.19, 1.01–1.40), while those with severe sleep deficits and no catch-up faced a 38% higher risk (HR 1.38, 1.17–1.63). These findings were replicated in a separate US health survey involving 4,586 participants.

Li X, Zhang M, Li Z, 等 (2026). Acute sleep rebound following sleep restriction is associated with reduced mortality risk. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72461-1

This is a study that records data without random assignment. People who are unable to catch up on sleep may have been busier or in poorer health to begin with, so this layer of bias cannot be entirely eliminated. The phrase 'the two groups that caught up showed no increase in risk' simply means no difference was detected; their point estimates are still greater than 1, so catching up does not equate to being unaffected. Therefore, if you stay up late, you should catch up on sleep as soon as possible, but you should not stay up late recklessly because of it. In this study, 'catching up on sleep' refers to sleeping a bit longer the first night after a period of sleep deprivation, and does not include sleeping in all at once on the weekend. Making 'staying up during the week and catching up on the weekend' a fixed weekly rhythm is a different matter known as social jetlag, which is itself associated with cardiovascular disease; see item 13 of this section (sleeping approximately 7 hours per night with a fixed schedule). The instruction to maintain a fixed wake-up time on weekends can be found in Section 3, item 2 (fixed wake-up time, same for weekends), which does not conflict with this item: this item encourages you to go to bed earlier that night, not to sleep until noon the next day.