Nope, you can’t catch up on lost sleep over the holidays, or at all

Go ahead, sleep in on a weekend; but don’t think you are making up for lost hours of sleep over the work week, says an NHLBI-funded study, published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. The researchers, while noting that this was a small study, stress two key findings. First, sleeping in on weekends does not appear to restore the body’s stress responses down to normal levels. Second, the habit of deprivation during the week and “binging” on sleep on weekends is very hard to break the longer it continues, as people are less likely to realize they are sleepy and have more trouble doing everyday tasks.