Can You Really ‘Catch Up’ on Sleep?

It’s tempting, but does it actually work?

Tell us if this sounds familiar: You sacrifice sleep all week long to juggle work, workouts, and—oh, yeah—a social life, telling yourself that you’ll “catch up” on sleep over the weekend. Welcome to the club.

Sadly, your foolproof planning for making up those Zzz’s isn’t really legit, say experts—and by trying to do so, you might actually be doing more damage to your body.

“Trying to make up all the hours actually distorts your body clock,” says Janet Kennedy, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating sleep disorders and the author of The Good Sleeper. “It makes you feel more sluggish and cranky and is more stressful for your body.”

What exactly does that stress do? When you make a habit out of screwing with your sleep schedule, you end up having to force yourself to take naps or power through the day with caffeine, both of which add to your body’s confusion when it’s time to hit the hay. Say hello to insomnia and sleep anxiety.

Ideally, we’d all be getting a solid eight hours every night and feeling totally sleep-deprived wouldn’t be a problem. But since late nights at the office and ladies’ nights at the bar tend to get in the way, we need to get smarter about the way we sleep, or face the consequences.

Sleep deprivation isn’t just annoying to deal with; it can be damaging to your brain. Getting less than eight hours can slow your cognitive function and ability to process information the next day. One of the functions of sleep is to clear all that cognitive waste from your brain each day, so making a habit of skimping on sleep can lead to serious memory impairment. Yikes.

The good news is this: It’s not a matter of making time to make up all those hours you missed.

Thanks to your body’s internal clock, you can even out without “catching up” completely, says Kennedy. Rather than trying to sleep past noon on Sundays, aim to stick to as close to a normal schedule as possible. So that means shooting to get up closer to 9 a.m. on weekends, even if you were working late all week.

“Sticking close to a regular pattern is really what’s best for your body,” says Kennedy. “Otherwise, your body will always be playing catch up, and that game of catch up is actually worse. Your body typically can’t make up for your entire sleep debt, particularly if that debt is chronically large.”

That means even having a radically different sleep schedule on weekends versus weekdays can really screw with your clock and make it almost impossible for you to get back into a good rhythm.

The bottom line: Listen to your bod, and remember that sleep is as much of a priority for your health as that 6 a.m. indoor-cycling class.