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Comment by MereInterest | Hacker News Reader

It is the difference between chronic and acute sleep deprivation. Go 100 hours without sleep, and sure you'll be hallucinating at the end, but you recover after about 16 hours of sleep. On the other hand, get slightly less sleep than you need, and it builds up over time, and requires an equal amount to get back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Counteracting...

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Inconsistent sleep patterns can also cause circadian rhythm disorders. I struggle with delayed sleep phase syndrome as a result of years of poor sleep hygiene. I use what is called chronotherapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotherapy_(sleep_phase)) every few months or so in order to put my sleep schedule back at a reasonable time.

That's not what it says. It says that the recovery is slower for chronic sleep deprivation, not that it takes 'as much'. Do you contend that it could take an entire decade to dig out of a large sleep debt two extra hours a night?

After chronic partial sleep restriction, the recovery process of cognitive functioning seems to take longer than after acute total SD. Performance in the PVT was not restored after one 10 h recovery night, but approached the baseline level after two 10 h nights in a study with seven consecutive sleep restriction nights with 5 h sleep/night (Dinges et al 1997). Using the same test, three 8 h recovery nights were not enough to restore performance after one week of sleep restriction

Ah, thank you. I was attempting to find a source for something that I vaguely remembered, while rather tired. The irony of delaying on sleep while reading an article about sleep loss was not lost on me.

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