Are you in debt?

Before you go thinking that this is another whinge about my student loan, it's not. I've been feeling less than energetic over the past few days and decided to do some research on 'sleep debt'. Apparently if you sleep less than 8 hours in one night, you will start to accumulate 'sleep debt' which will continue to have an effect on you until you pay back your debt by sleeping for longer than 8 hours in a night, but you can only pay back 1-2 hours at a time. One website I was on said that you can be in debt by a maximum of up to 20 hours and an all-nighter can quickly put you in debt of 8 hours.

For me, an all-nighter is just about every Saturday night and there's no way that I sleep for 9+ hours during the week to pay back my sleepless weekend. This must mean that I am perpetually in debt when it comes to sleep.

To me, the science behind this is a bit odd, because I know for a fact that the most restful sleep occurs during REM, and sleeping for longer doesn't necessarily increase the amount of REM you experience - for example, look up polyphasic sleeping. As for sleeping longer to pay off sleep debt, I've personally found that I feel more tired after oversleeping.

What do you think?