A New Study Says Sleeping In On The Weekends Has An Unexpected Effect On Your Heart

Your busy schedule during the week can wreck your sleep habits. As much as you try to fit everything into your day, it can be tough to get your recommended seven hours of sleep each night. Once the weekend rolls around, you may feel a sense of freedom knowing that you won't be hearing that jarring alarm at 5 a.m.

Getting a little more sleep on the weekends might just be good for you, says a 2024 study presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress. People who are sleep deprived who caught up the most sleep on the weekends reduced their risk of heart disease by 20%, compared to those who got less sleep on the weekends.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that one-third of people in the United States don't get enough sleep. (Here's how to know if you're not sleeping enough.) While an occasional night of tossing and turning is normal, chronic sleep deprivation can lead to conditions such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and obesity — all conditions that lead to heart disease, heart attack, and stroke. However, continually disrupting your sleep routines could also affect your heart.

Your body needs sleep to recover and restore itself from the demands of your day. When you're consistently depleted of your sleep, researchers call it sleep debt. A 2020 study in Sleep Medicine found that about 1 in 5 people had severe sleep debt, meaning they needed over 90 minutes more sleep each night. Just 24% of people with sleep debt made up for lost sleep by either taking naps or sleeping in on the weekends. That leaves 76% of those severely sleep-deprived to be at risk for chronic health issues such as heart disease.

However, habitually losing sleep and then binging on your sleep on the weekends can disrupt your circadian rhythms, making it that much harder for you to hear that alarm on Monday morning, says the American Heart Association. Over time, that can impact your blood pressure. According to a 2023 study in Hypertension, you could be at a higher risk for high blood pressure if the amount of sleep you get varies from night to night, even if you do get enough sleep. They found that when the time people went to bed at night varied by 34 minutes, they had a 32% higher risk of high blood pressure.

It might sound contradictory that sleeping in on the weekends can reduce your risk of heart disease, but getting more sleep on some days rather than others can be bad for your blood pressure. The National Sleep Foundation published a 2023 consensus statement in Sleep Health to address this contradiction after reviewing 63 studies on sleep routines and deprivation.

Overall, it's important to establish a consistent time for you to sleep each night, which means going to bed and waking up at the same time each day to get enough sleep. (Here are some tricks to try when it's hard to sleep at night.) However, if for whatever reason you miss out on sleep during the week, you can catch up on insufficient sleep on the weekends. In other words, following a routine sleep time keeps your circadian rhythms intact, which might help you get better sleep anyway. Yet the occasional sleepless night can be made up on the weekend by sleeping in. Just be sure not to sleep in too late because the missed morning light can shift your circadian rhythm and make it harder to readjust to the work week.