How long should you sleep the night after staying awake one whole night?

[Yuusha]

I have had a pretty terrible sleep schedule lately (going to bed at 6 AM and getting up at like 2 PM, bah), and the only thing that really works for me when I want to fix my sleep schedule is to power through one full night and then sleep like a log the next night. Now I'm wondering, how long should I sleep the next night in order to make up for the "all-nighter"? And with "make up for" I mean that I feel reasonably rested that morning. Right now I am aiming for about 12-14 hours, that seems quite reasonable, but what do you think?

[TravisE]

I'm tempted to say just sleep until you feel ready to get up, since that's what I do. I can't say whether that's the best idea or not, though—if you sleep too long you might run the risk of not correcting your sleep cycle, or worse, knocking it even further out of sync. Someone else might have better answers, since it appears that all I can say is “it depends”, which is probably not too helpful.

[Eamo24]

I have had a pretty terrible sleep schedule lately (going to bed at 6 AM and getting up at like 2 PM, bah), and the only thing that really works for me when I want to fix my sleep schedule is to power through one full night and then sleep like a log the next night. Now I'm wondering, how long should I sleep the next night in order to make up for the "all-nighter"? And with "make up for" I mean that I feel reasonably rested that morning. Right now I am aiming for about 12-14 hours, that seems quite reasonable, but what do you think? I too had the same problem for the last few weeks. As a result of the Christmas holidays, my sleep cycle went completely out of sync. I was going to bed at 6 or 7 in the morning and getting up at 3 in the afternoon. When the holidays ended, I had to get up early again -- about 7 am. So basically, I had to get up at the time I normally went to bed (difficult, right? ). So what happened was I took the entire first night off sleep -- I was so tired for the entire day -- constantly trying to stay awake. I thought “ah, tonight I will get asleep for sure and then my sleep cycle will be back to normal”. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. The next night I only got 4 hours sleep, but I became tired earlier each night until eventually I was going to bed at midnight and getting up at 7. The thing is, it took me about a week and a lot of sleep deprivation to get things back to normal. About your question, it might be different for everyone but in my experience, I think it would be difficult to sleep for 12 to 14 hours after taking one night off sleep. I’ve found that initially, I could only become tired at the time I usually went to bed -- so even if I did take the entire previous day off sleep, I would still struggle to get to sleep early the next night. It might take a few days or perhaps a week of getting up early in the morning before you are tired enough to go to sleep at an early hour and feel rested in the morning. Your body will most likely find a way to make up for the lack of sleep eventually. Good luck!

[snoop]

The best is to remain on a schedule if at all possible. Sleep like you normally would. Your body is on a cycle and the more you mess it up, the more damage you do. So, trying to make up for what you lost isn't a sensible thing to do. It might feel good, but so do drugs and a lot of other things that damage the body. If you're truly concerned about your health, then try and keep it on as much the same cycle as possible.