For many young people, similar scenarios play out every day. Surveys show that 69.3 per cent of young people go to bed after 11 p.m., and 52.5 per cent choose to stay up actively. [1]

　　When you stay up wildly at night and are sleepy as a dog during the day, you naturally have to find a way to catch up on your sleep. Underground squint against the wall, lunch break on the table to sleep for a while, such as toilet sitting toilet nap …… make up for sleep in a variety of ways.

　　After a nap, many people feel that the efficiency of the work is back, the brain directly full blood resurrection. Is it really so useful to catch up on sleep after a late night? A recent new study may give the answer.

　　Stay up late and nap during the day? It's still cognitively damaging!

　　Like me, many people think that staying up late doesn't matter, and that after some manipulation, if they just find time to take a nap during the day, it won't cause any harm to their bodies, but it doesn't.

　　Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Michigan State University conducted a trial on sleep and cognition, which recruited 275 participants. All participants were required to complete cognitive learning tasks (occupancy task, vigilant attention task) on the first night.

　　Afterwards, the researchers randomly assigned all participants to 3 groups. In the first group, participants went home and slept; in the second group, participants stayed up all night and were not allowed to nap; and in the third group, participants stayed up all night and were allowed to nap for 30 or 60 minutes. The next morning, all participants were asked to complete the cognitive learning task again.

　　The results showed that the stay-up-late and catch-up group made more mistakes in the cognitive learning task than the go-home-and-sleep group, and catching up on sleep did not bring much gain to the participants. This shows that staying up late and napping during the day did not fully mitigate the cognitive harm caused by sleep deprivation. [2] A related paper was published on 22 June 2021 in the journal Sleep.

　　Don't stay up! Staying up all night hurts your brain and your whole body, and catching up on sleep doesn't help either

　　As you can see from the above, napping after staying up all night has no way to fully mitigate the cognitive damage caused by staying up all night. And on 28 February 2019, a study published in Current Biology (Current Biology) showed that making up sleep is no way to make up for the metabolic problems caused by sleep deprivation.

　　The experiment lasted nine days, and the researchers divided the participants into three groups: a normal sleep group, which slept nine hours a day; a stay-up group, which slept five hours a day; and a stay-up-weekend catch-up group, which slept five hours a day for the first five days, slept at will on two days of the weekend, and slept five hours a day for the last two days.

　　In the experiment, stay up late weekend sleep group participants weekend energy intake becomes less, but the other time energy intake is still a lot of energy intake, the overall energy intake has not been reduced, the weight is still showing an upward trend. What's worse, they were less sensitive to insulin compared to the staying up late group. [3] This shows that catch-up sleep behaviour is not very effective for metabolic problems caused by sleep deprivation (e.g. weight gain, reduced insulin sensitivity, etc.).

　　Guys, don't stay up late and go to bed early.