Sleeping for Two? Sleep Debt and Pregnancy

If you know anyone who has had children, I'm sure they have told you how TIRED they are! Dr. Cavanaugh, Ph.D. spoke about something called sleep debt, and an accompanying phenomenon, sleep rebound. Although sleep debt has become something of a buzzword, sleep rebound is perhaps more controversial. Dr. Cavanaugh affirmed my assumption, based on what I personally have read, that there are split camps when it comes to sleep rebound. Some believe that you can make up for lost sleep, others aren’t so sure. As a college student, my own experience leads me to believe that you can “catch up” on sleep, so to speak.

Sleep changes when a woman is pregnant. According to the National Sleep Foundation's 1998 Women and Sleep poll, 78% percent of pregnant women experience sleep disturbances that they didn't experience before becoming pregnant. How do these disturbances affect sleep while pregnant, and how much do they contribute to the overall sleep deficit that pregnant women and parents of young children -in this case, I'll focus on the women- experience as parents of infants and young children?

Unfortunately, the sleep debt begins accumulating in pregnancy, maybe even in the first trimester, and doesn’t end until the child is, at the very least, sleeping through the night routinely. Sleep debt, like any debt, is said to accumulate. If a mother of a 2-month-old infant slept 8 hours before pregnancy, 6.5 (interrupted) hours during her pregnancy, and is now sleeping only 5 hours a night, due to her newborn child- her sleep debt is roughly 585 hours of sleep. All before the child’s first half-birthday! In America, most workplaces are asking that (read: making) mothers go back to work sooner than they’d ever have the chance to pay their sleep debt off!

So, you’re in sleep debt. Maybe for me, a college student, the accumulation of sleep debt isn’t as consistent as the debt accumulated by a pregnant woman or young mother- for me, it looks like a few hours here, a few hours there. Sometimes, it’s a Saturday night of going out with friends and the subsequent sleep-in session the next morning- an example of the sleep rebound. The sleep rebound, as Dr. Cavanaugh described to us, is the period in which the body “pays off” sleep debt.

How can we use this knowledge to help pregnant women in sleep debt? Finding ways to make sleep more comfortable during pregnancy, splitting childcare between partners, and increasing the duration of maternity leaves all seem like viable options to me!

References

Pregnancy and Sleep, from https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/pregnancy-and-sleep

Webster, M. (2008, May 06). Can You Catch Up on Lost Sleep?, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-can-you-catch-up-on-sleep/

Cavanaugh, D. (2017, February 14). The Drosophila Circadian Clock Gates Sleep Timing Through Interactions with Sleep-Promoting Neurons. Lecture presented at Neuroscience Seminar in Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL.