Here’s what you need to know.

A healthy amount of sleep is essential for the human body. Many people go through sleep deprivation which can seriously hinder cognitive performance for more than a week. Here’s how to recover from sleep deprivation.

On average adults need around seven hours of sleep daily, but people who suffer from sleep deprivation have a sleep cycle that varies widely which can make it difficult to make up for lost sleep. Sleep medicine specialist Dr. Stephanie M. Stahl stated “This study adds to a large body of evidence that insufficient sleep has detrimental effects on our daytime functioning,” she said. “This study in particular highlights that even a short duration of obtaining only 1–2 hours below our goal of 7-plus hours of sleep caused persistence of impairment, even after 1 week of obtaining sufficient sleep.”

The only method to which you can recover from sleep deprivation is to make up lost sleep and that can make the recovery process very long. While the body’s reaction time can recover quickly from lost sleep, behavioral and neurophysiological will still suffer from the effects of sleep deprivation and will take more time to recover from the amount of lost sleep.