Good news for adolescents who cop criticism from their parents for spending Saturday and Sunday mornings asleep in bed: the experts approve because long lie-ins are an antidote to the sleep deficits that teenagers build up during the week.
”Teenagers need 10 hours’ sleep a night and there is no problem with them trying to make up for lost sleep at the weekend,” the University of Pennsylvania’s David Dinges told fellow sleep experts attending an international congress in Sydney.
Professor Dinges said the pace of city life meant it was harder and harder for urban types to get enough sleep. He said it was not for nothing that coffee had become the second most traded commodity after petroleum.
”Coffee is powerful and people are using it to try and cheat the body into thinking it has had enough sleep, but the body can’t be cheated,” Dinges said.
He warned of the sometimes fatal consequences that come from inadvertent ”microsleeps” and pushed the benefits of what experts call ”prophylactic sleeps” and what others call ”power naps” or ”sleep snacks”.
The University of Sydney’s Naomi Rogers reaffirmed the conventional wisdom that it was best to avoid coffee and alcohol on long-haul flights. For every time zone crossed, travellers should allow a day to recover from jet lag, Professor Rogers said.
Crossing the nine time zones on a flight from Australia to Europe could take up to nine days to recover from, she said.
Rogers, who presented a paper at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research gathering, said there were no long-term effects of jet lag but the short-term symptoms were well known: fuzziness, slow reaction times and reduced alertness.
It’s better to take a taxi from the airport and pick up the hire car the following day, she said.
”Once the body actually adjusts to the new time zone, there doesn’t seem to be any lasting effects,” Dr Rogers said. ‒ Sapa-DPA