Weekends to be blamed for sleepy Mondays

Weekends to be blamed for sleepy Mondays (Thinkstock photos/Getty Images)

Many people try and ''catch up'' on sleep lost in the week by lying in at the weekend but a leading sleep expert has claimed that this may actually make you even dozier come Monday morning.

Gregory Carter says that sleeping even an hour later than usual on Saturday and Sunday disrupts the body's internal clock.

This is because it makes it harder to get to sleep on Sunday night, and as a result more difficult to get up the following day.

"A great myth of sleep deprivation is that if we miss sleep over the course of the working week, we need to catch up on an hour-by-hour basis on the weekend," the Daily Mail quoted Dr Carter as saying.

But the neurologist and sleep medicine specialist, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, insisted that any ''sleep debt'' from the working week can be balanced out by just spending eight hours in bed.

"To maintain our internal clock, we need to go to bed eight hours before our usual time for getting out of bed in the morning," he said.

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