While it may feel this way, the science strongly indicates this is not the case. The study in the linked article is one proof point. Many others are summarized in Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”.
> weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of insufficient sleep
Just like 'ferros' described, if you have a single occasional week of limited sleep, making it up on the weekends DOES have benefits. The problem starts when you repeatedly sleep an inadequate number of hours during the week.
This has almost nothing to do with what ferros said. No, resting on the weekend won't uneat or burn the extra calories, in the same way that it won't rewrite all your bad code or help your fuzzy memory, but it could very well help you perform at a more normal level the next week.
Also, to your point, very few people spend their sleeping hours eating. You could eat 1500 calories for every meal and be very lithe - if you slept 23 hours a day. By contrast, it seems anecdotally that people who get less sleep tend to eat more food and more of it is unhealthy: late night Taco Bell, delivery when you're pulling an all-nighter, etc.
Best diet pill on the market? Unisom.
Not sure if this statement is sound, for the average person.
If you ate 4500 per day, spread across 3, 20 minute meals, and spent the remaining 23 hours sleeping... your energy expenditure would be minimal, whilst your energy intake large. The average person would gain weight rapidly. (300lb athletes perhaps not, but these are outliers).
Towards the end of the book The Hungry Brain, by Guyenet, there's a reference to research where both the sleep deprived group and the control group are let loose in the city and allowed to eat whatever they wanted, conditioned on letting the researchers weight and classify it first.
On average, the sleep deprived group ate around 300 calories more.
(sorry I can't produce the original reference, I don't have the book with me)
The mechanism that drives this are the hormones ghrelin and leptin. Look up their action if you're interested.
Maybe all it says is they grew up thinking that "weekend sleeping helped catch-up" and now they only remember the confirming evidence and discard the disconfirming evidence to support their confirmation bias?
Should his feelings count as evidence in any meaningful sense?
Or do we generally assume that his feelings -- especially since they are contrary to science -- are not a good guide to what really happens?
Margarine is good for you in 1970, bad for you in 2010.
Good luck.
This is different from the question of whether he is actually sober, of course. But the post you're replying to is specifically about the claim that X person feels better, not about any physical effects on their body. I'd rather trust a person about how they say they feel (especially at a given moment), than studies trying to determine how most people probably feel or ought to feel in a similar situation.
Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal.
It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires.
I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
Example: [Apparently] having coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, it's that caffeine dependency (and maybe a little dehydration) makes you feel terrible. Coffee temporarily reverse this negative [local maxima].
Coffee appears to wake you up, but it's doing the opposite.
There are many common examples - 'drinking doesn't affect my driving', 'I don't drink heavily', 'advertising doesn't affect me', 'I get enough exercise', 'my diet is healthy', 'I go to church regularly'.
Reports here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7...., for example, have measured overreporting of exercise/church attendance at double.
Pain scores, Depression scores are the ones I remember right now
So yes, it is something that's used because you don't have a way of directly measuring all things
The point is you can't do anything with his anecdote. It gives you no more information about what you should do, and is therefore technically useless.
Only way I've managed to recover is to take an entire month off, sleep as much as I want for the first week (or two) and slowly try to shift back into an 8 hour cycle.