Sleeping in on weekends lowers heart disease risk, study reveals

If you sleep an extra hour or two on Saturday, stop feeling guilty about it. New research suggests that catching up on lost sleep over the weekend may actually be good for your heart. Scientists studying more than 41,000 adults found that people who slept longer on their days off were up to 9% less likely to have high blood pressure.

And it turns out the sweet spot isn't an entire Sunday spent horizontal. Researchers found the biggest benefit at around 1 hour and 27 minutes of extra sleep.

Your Saturday sleep-in might be doing some actual work

Nearly half of U.S. adults aren't getting the recommended amount of sleep each night. That is a problem because sleep is not just about whether you can function through a Monday morning meeting without staring blankly at your screen. Your cardiovascular system needs it too.

During sleep, blood pressure normally drops by roughly 10%, a phenomenon known as nocturnal dipping. Consistently missing out on sleep can interfere with that process and contribute to higher blood pressure.

Now, high blood pressure is one of the major risk factors for cardiovascular disease. That's why the American Heart Association includes healthy sleep in its Life's Essential 8 checklist alongside things like exercise, diet and avoiding tobacco.

Weekend sleep is not automatically bad sleep hygiene

The conventional advice has been to keep your bedtime and wake-up time consistent. And there's a good reason for that. A wildly different weekend schedule can create what's known as social jet lag—basically, your body's internal clock getting confused because your sleep schedule changes depending on whether it's Tuesday or Saturday.

Previous research has linked irregular sleep schedules with poorer health outcomes, including a higher risk of cardiovascular problems.

But the new research adds an important wrinkle. What if you're not sleeping in because you're lazy, but because you're exhausted? That's a very different situation.

Your body might be trying to pay back its sleep debt

During an analysis of sleep data from 41,000 adults collected between 2016 and 2023, researchers from Korea University found that people who extended their sleep on weekends had lower rates of high blood pressure. They also found up to a 9% lower risk among those who caught up on sleep.

If you are consistently running on too little sleep during the week, your body does not magically forget about it because you made it to Friday. “Not getting enough sleep puts extra stress on the body,” study author Dr. Nawon Lee said, explaining that extra weekend sleep may give the body an opportunity to recover.

But don't turn Sunday into a 15-hour sleep marathon

There is, unfortunately, a catch. The researchers found that more is not necessarily better. Getting more than about four additional hours of sleep on the weekend was associated with an increased risk of hypertension.

Sleeping excessively can create even more irregularity in your sleep schedule and disrupt your body's circadian rhythm, potentially wiping out some of the benefits of catching up.

Your heart would like you to stop treating sleep as optional

Previous research has found that people with irregular sleep schedules can face substantially higher risks of serious cardiovascular events, including stroke, heart failure and heart attack.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to wake up at precisely the same minute every day for the rest of their lives. But your sleep schedule is important.

Think of it like charging your phone. Ideally, you don't wait until 2% battery before plugging it in every night. But if you do spend the week running on fumes, giving yourself some extra charging time over the weekend is not exactly a bad idea. Just don't leave the charger plugged in until Tuesday.

If work and a busy schedule have been cheating your sleep time lately, take some time out to get some extra sleep this weekend.

Source: New York Post