Ticket 06 of 07

Does sleeping until ten on Saturday pay back the week?

In one line. It pays back some of the tiredness and none of the timing; the body clock gets a three-hour shift every weekend and spends Monday and Tuesday paying it off.

The lie-in is the one indulgence a working man feels entitled to, and the counter is not here to take it away. The question is whether it does what he thinks it does. He goes short on sleep from Monday to Friday, banks a long morning on Saturday and another on Sunday, and expects to start the next week level. What he reports instead, often without connecting the two, is a Monday that feels like a mild hangover.

Research has looked at this pattern under the name of a weekend shift, and the mechanism is the clock, not the hours. Waking at seven all week and at ten on the weekend is, to the body, the same as flying three time zones west on Friday night and three time zones east on Sunday night. The sleep itself is real; the extra hours do take the edge off the tiredness. But the clock that decides when the man feels sleepy and when he feels awake has been moved, and on Monday morning it is still running on Saturday's setting.

The gentler version keeps most of the pleasure and loses most of the cost. Get up within an hour of the weekday time, open the curtains, and take the extra sleep as an early night on Friday or a nap after lunch on Saturday instead of a late morning. Daylight on waking is the strongest signal the clock receives, which is why the man who takes the dog out at eight on Sunday tends to feel steadier on Monday than the one who surfaces at eleven.

Some men notice that once the weekend stops swinging, the weekdays need less rescuing in the first place; the short nights were partly the lie-in's doing, because Sunday's late morning pushed Sunday's bedtime later as well.

Where the desk stops. This page is about an ordinary weekly habit. A man who sleeps long every day and still wakes unrefreshed, or who cannot stay awake through an afternoon, has a question for a physician, not for a counter.