Have you ever woken up to the feeling of being jetlagged, even if you didn’t travel? That’s fatigue and sleep deprivation catching up to you. In this article, we will look into social jetlag and discuss what you can do to recover from it.
When we hear the word “jetlag,” we usually think of the inability to fall asleep caused by long-haul travel and crossing time zones. But in 2006, a new term was coined by a German sleep researcher, Till Roenneberg: “social jetlag.” According to this phenomenon, people can experience the effects of jetlag even if they just crossed town over the weekend.
Here’s how it works.
What is Social Jetlag?
Social jetlag pertains to the phenomenon wherein a person has different sleeping patterns throughout the week, causing feelings similar to jetlag. While the discrepancy usually occurs between weekdays and weekends, it can manifest itself under different circumstances.
For example, when you go to a party that starts on Saturday evening and extends into the wee hours of Sunday morning, your regular sleep patterns would be disrupted. By the time Monday rolls around, you need to drag yourself out of bed because you’re still exhausted from the night before.
Now, you may not be the type to go to late-night parties, so this scenario doesn’t resonate with you. But it doesn’t mean that you’re automatically in the clear.
Social jetlag could also occur when you stay up late on Friday night and sleep in on Saturday morning because you know that you have nothing important to rush to. Your bedtime may shift by just a few hours, but it’s enough to mess up your internal clock. This is why come Monday evening, you would already experience difficulty falling asleep at your usual time.
The problem with social jetlag is that, unlike its namesake, it is chronic. When you fly to a different time zone and experience travel jetlag, your body would eventually adjust as it is exposed to the natural rhythms of the sunrise and sunset. In contrast, social jetlag occurs even when you stay in just one place. To make matters worse, you are likely to repeat the habit every weekend. It’s like you live in different time zones during the weekdays and the weekends.
Who is Most at Risk to Experience Social Jetlag?
- Students
Did you know that teenagers and young adults need 9 hours of sleep each day to function properly? Yet most students who have a bedtime of 11 pm wake up at 6 am because they need to get to class by 7:30 am. This amounts to just 7 hours of sleep. Accordingly, they would be inclined to sleep in during the weekends as their still-growing bodies would be sleep-deprived at that point. This, in turn, would adjust their weekend bedtime a little later. When Monday comes around and they try to switch back to their original schedule, their internal clocks would already be out of whack.
- Social butterflies
People with active social lives have events and hangouts they need to attend, even during the weekdays. Hence, their sleep schedule varies according to their social calendar, thereby messing up their sleep cycle.
- Office workers
Office workers who stick to the 9-to-5 are likely to spend the weekend doing chores, running errands, and catching up with friends. They tend to maximize their free days, which results in later nights.
What are the Effects of Social Jetlag?
- Intense morning grogginess
- Feeling sleepy throughout the day
- Difficulty concentrating
- Increased irritability
- Fatigue
- Difficulty falling asleep at night
- Greater risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular problems, obesity, depression, and high blood pressure
How to Recover from Social Jetlag
Don’t sleep in.
I know this is a tall order, as weekends seem to be made for sleeping in. However, doing so won’t really give you rest; in fact, it will only make you more fatigued in the long run. So make sure to still set your alarm, even if it is a Saturday.
Stick to a consistent sleep schedule.
When it comes to proper sleep cycles, consistency is the most important thing. It is essential that you have a set bedtime and waking up every day, and should there be variations, make sure to keep it to 1.5 hours at most.
This means that if you stay up for 1.5 hours later on Saturday evening, you still wake up at your fixed time on Sunday morning. In contrast, if you sleep at your bedtime on Saturday evening but you want to sleep in longer, you can set your alarm 1.5 hours later on Sunday morning. Meanwhile, if you sleep for 1 hour later on Saturday evening, you can sleep an extra 30 minutes longer on Sunday morning.
Why 1.5 hours? According to Shelby Harris, a doctor in Behavioral Sleep Medicine and author of the Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia, 1.5 hours is the window of deviation that will not cause social jetlag, as it does not extend to multiple hours of change.
Pay off sleep debt through naps.
Sleep debt that has been accumulated over the week is usually the cause of later days during the weekends. However, you would end up harming your body more if you catch up on the five hours you missed in one day. In this case, the best thing you can do is make up for lost sleep through naps.
Depending on your schedule, you may want to take a thirty-minute nap during the morning and another one in the afternoon, or you can have one long siesta that can go for as long as an hour and thirty minutes. Just remember to stay within the 1.5 hour-range, and there should be no disruption to that night’s sleep.
If this isn’t feasible for you because you have work or school all day, you can consider taking a short thirty-minute nap every day when you get home in the afternoon. Come Friday, you would have had an additional 2.5 hours of sleep — enough to help you bounce back better from social jetlag.
Pre-schedule your sleep.
For many people, sleep takes on the back burner when they’re planning their schedule, as they prioritize all the other tasks they need to accomplish. Anything that is left, they allot to sleep.
I recommend that you do the exact opposite of this. The best way to ensure that you get some proper shut-eye is by scheduling your sleeping times before you plan your to-dos.
If your bedtime is 11 pm - 6 am, and you want to squeeze in a nap from 5:30 pm to 6 pm, then make sure to block those times out first. So when you plan your schedule for the week, you have to work around these set times.
You may be worried that you won’t have enough time to finish everything this way, but the truth is that there are always enough hours in a day. It’s just a matter of how you spend them. You complain about not having enough time for sleep and work, but you have time to spend an hour mindlessly watching videos on Youtube and another hour scrolling through Facebook. By eliminating these factors and setting those hours aside for sleep, you make yourself more mindful of how you spend your time.
If this is something you want to incorporate in your life, I would advise against using weekly or monthly planners to keep track of your agenda. Instead, use hourly planners that are compact and easy to bring around so that it would be easy for you to check and be reminded of what you should be doing. An alternative to this is to download apps like Timebloc, which works as an hourly planner and has alerts to remind you of what you should be doing at a particular time.
Hanging out with friends until the break of dawn and sleeping in until noon may feel great for your soul, but it isn’t so advantageous to your body. The good thing is that you don’t have to entirely cut out one for the other. With a few tweaks here and there, you can have a social life and a sleep schedule that is fruitful and satisfying.
