The Scientific Reason You’re Tired On Monday

One of my favorite things to do is go to bed on Friday nights without setting an alarm for the next morning.

Few things are more satisfying than those extra hours of rest — especially after a long week.

Who doesn’t like waking up naturally, without an insistent ringing telling you it’s time to get up?

Sleeping in is a habit that many people are used to indulging in. Starting as early as adolescence, the practice can easily continue into adulthood. Snoozing for 10 or more hours into Saturday and Sunday is, for a lot of us, a method of playing catch up on a work week riddled with poor or inconsistent sleep. It’s how we heal or rest up — or, at least, that’s what we’ve gotten used to telling ourselves.

As Nsikan Akpan points out in this PBS article, it turns out that your sleeping habits don’t cover those rollover minutes the same way your cell phone plan does. “People like to sleep in on the weekends because it makes them feel better,” says clinical health psychologist Kelly Glazer Baron. “The problem is: You’re at a greater disadvantage for getting on track during the week.”

According to a scientific study on sleep impairment, people don’t just adjust to a routinely disparate weekday and weekend sleep schedule. “People think that they’ve trained themselves to get by on less and less sleep,” explains Brant Hasler, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, “but what they’ve really done is lose track of the effects.” That means you’re not so much getting better at living with less sleep as you are getting worse at noticing what the bad habit is doing to you.