The beginning of a new year can wipe the slate clean for fresh life and work goals—but if your holidays were hectic, you might not be starting at zero when it comes to your sleep. Missing out on even small chunks of sleep for a few nights can snowball into sleep debt that you could be lugging into 2026. While you probably can’t snooze enough to disappear that deficit, you can take steps to support the parts of your body that bear the biggest burden.
Some of the consequences of owing your body sleep are readily apparent, like feeling drowsy, irritable, or brain-foggy, or catching seemingly every virus. But other effects can be less noticeable, like, for instance, the impact on your cardiovascular system, which builds with time. “Sleep debt raises inflammation and stress hormones, which puts extra strain on the heart and blood vessels, increasing your risk of high blood pressure and heart disease,” Angela Holliday-Bell, MD, a board-certified physician and sleep specialist, tells SELF.
Piling onto these detriments is the metabolic fallout: Skimping on sleep (even for just a night or two) can dampen your sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that tells your cells to soak up sugar from your blood, which raises your blood glucose levels. That ups your risk for type 2 diabetes, amplifying the assault on your heart, and it also impairs your brain’s ability to create energy from glucose, Louisa Nicola, MMed, a New York–based neurophysiologist who studies Alzheimer’s disease in women, tells SELF. Over time, that can make your brain less resilient against stressors like illness and aging, speeding up changes tied to dementia.
Getting out of sleep debt can be trickier than it seems.
Much like wracking up credit card debt, the greater your sleep deficit, the tougher it can be to repay it and get back to baseline. Consider a scenario where you get one hour less sleep than you need every night during the week, meaning that come the weekend, you’d have to sleep an extra five hours to make up for the deficit. “The problem is, our ability to sleep is not just determined by our homeostatic sleep drive, or how tired you feel based on how long you’ve been awake,” Jennifer Martin, PhD, spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and professor at Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University, tells SELF. “It’s also governed by our circadian rhythm, which will not just allow us to sleep five hours later than normal to account for that debt.”
Even trying to recoup more than a couple hours of sleep debt over the course of a weekend is challenging when your internal clock wants you to wake up at your typical time, Dr. Martin adds. And if you do manage to snooze a good bit extra on your days off, it still “will not fully erase the impact on the body of days of insufficient sleep,” Dr. Holliday-Bell notes. As with monetary debt, avoiding sleep debt in the first place will always be easier than paying it off.
If some amount of sleep debt is a given for you, a burst of high-intensity exercise may help you recover.
Sometimes, missing out on sleep for a few days or longer is all but unavoidable, say, because of a tough patch at work or the reality of life as a new parent. Or maybe you’re struggling with insomnia and despite your best efforts, you’re coming up short. You probably know how to temporarily jolt yourself into alertness—cold water to the face, a walk outside, an extra-caffeinated beverage. But research suggests you might want to embrace a small dose of high-intensity exercise too. It could go further than combatting sleepiness, also helping to partially offset some of the repercussions of sleep debt on the body.
