Those extra hours of sleep on the weekend are what dreams are made of aren't they?
Heading to sleep a couple more episodes of House of Cards in and snoozing a few more into the morning are what helps what make adulthood so fun.
Yes, you drag your bum from the pub to get the early nights sleep you need on weeknights (usually anyway), but the weekend is yours, and yours alone to enjoy.
Well, this is what 85% of us mortals do.
Some people just stick to their blummin' routine seven days a week, and it turns out, they are likelier to be happy and healthy.
Who are these poeple?
This is all due to 'social jet lag', a term that surfaced around 2012.
It's the phenomenon whereby changing your sleeping pattern over the weekend mimics the feeling of moving time zones twice over the weekend. Till Roenneberg, PhD, a professor at the University of Munich apparently coined the term. She explains:
The behaviour looks like if most people on a Friday evening fly from Paris to New York or Los Angeles to Tokyo and on Monday they fly back. Since this looks like almost a travel jet lag situation, we called it social jet lag. They have to live a life almost in a different time zone in comparison to their biological clock.
Social jet lag was previously linked to obesity, and now a recent study claims it can also effect mood, fatigue, as well as see an 11 per cent increase in the likelihood of heart disease with every hour.
A lead author of the study, called Sierra B. Forbush, from the University of Arizona told Eureka Alert:
These results indicate that sleep regularity, beyond sleep duration alone, plays a significant role in our health. This suggests that a regular sleep schedule may be an effective, relatively simple, and inexpensive preventative treatment for heart disease as well as many other health problems.
The study surveyed 983 adults from the age of 22 to 60.
Unfortunately, this seems to be another piece of evidence that indicates we can't catch up on good habits, and we need to keep regularity and moderation.
In other words? Seven hours of sleep every single night, be it Tuesday of Saturday night.
Bleurgh, how boring.
