Sleep by: Lauren Matus

      

     Sleep is very important. When I'm not doing loads of homework or hanging out with friends and family, most of the time I can be caught sleeping. I know that because anytime I do take a nap after school, I wake up to hundreds of texts and as soon as I say something back to reply, they're like "Lauren you're awake! Finally!" (@becca) In the article, Sleeping in on the weekend can't make up for lost sleep, produced by Science News, a study was done to see the effect of people sleeping for different amounts of time and the effects on their body. In the study, Christopher Depner, who is a sleep physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his team, conducted an experiment where they had three groups of people sleep different amounts for 2 weeks. One group slept for eight hours, the second group got five hours, and the last group got five hours but slept in on the weekends The results concluded that the ones that slept in until noon on the weekends, usually stayed up until midnight-one on Fridays and Saturdays, however they stayed up late on Sundays. It's easy to assume that sleeping in on the weekends would make up for the lost time during the week, but in reality, that group of people only got an extra 1.1 hours of sleep.

    The sleep study results also concluded the potential effects of not getting enough sleep, which includes weight gain. The groups of people that got the 5 hours of sleep and the group that also got that amount of sleep, but slept on the weekends gained about 1.5 kilograms, which is equivalent to 3.3 lbs! The science behind this shows that people who don't get enough sleep can't properly produce an appetite controlling hormone called leptin. Since their natural "biological clock" was off, due to their late sleep schedules, these people had many late night snacks which is what caused the weight gain.
     Peter Liu, who is a sleep endocrinologist at UCLA, stated, "'Resting is the third pillar of a healthy lifestyle: sleep, exercise, and diet...Just like you wouldn't say to someone, you need to be on a good diet from Monday to Friday, but on the weekend you can eat whatever you like, I think it's the same principle here with sleep"'. Whether one realizes it or not, all three of these factors contribute greatly to living a long, healthy life. Sometimes, especially with school work and after school activities, it's hard to keep these three factors in mind. Sleep is the factor that is the hardest for me, since I don't get much of it during the week, and I'm so guilty of sleeping in one the weekends.
Source: Rehm, Jeremy. “Sleeping in on the Weekend Can't Make up for Lost Sleep.” Science News, 1 Mar. 2019, www.sciencenews.org/article/sleep-recovery-weekend-health.