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

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

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

In plain terms: People who get less sleep than they need and fail to make it up the following night have roughly a 15% higher risk of mortality compared to those with regular sleep patterns. Those who are severely sleep-deprived and still don’t catch up face a 42% higher risk. For people who do make up the lost sleep, no such elevated risk is observed. So, if you stay up late, go to bed early the next night.

Benefit: 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.

Evidence grade: B

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

Notes: This is an observational study with no formal grouping of participants. It is possible that people who cannot catch up on sleep are inherently busier or in poorer health, a factor this study does not fully account for. The fact that no risk elevation was detected in the two catch-up groups only means no statistically significant difference was found; their point estimates remain above 1, so catching up on sleep does not completely eliminate all risk. Therefore, if you stay up late, you should aim to make up the lost sleep as soon as possible, but this does not give you a free pass to regularly sacrifice sleep. For the purposes of this study, “catching up on sleep” refers to getting extra sleep on the first night after a deficit, and does not include waiting until the weekend to make up the total deficit. Maintaining a regular sleep schedule where you stay up on weekdays and catch up on weekends — a pattern known as social jetlag — is itself linked to cardiovascular disease; see item 13 in this section (aim to get around 7 hours of sleep per night with consistent sleep times). The recommendation to wake up at the same time every day, including on weekends (see item 2 in section 3) does not conflict with this advice: it simply encourages you to go to bed early on the night after a sleepless night, rather than sleeping in until noon the following day.