Should teenagers sleep in on the weekends?
The right amount of catch-up sleep could benefit adolescents’ mental health
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When adolescents don’t sleep enough, it can affect their cognitive functioning and mental health. Particularly on school nights, however, many fall short of the 8-10 hours recommended for 13- to 18-year-olds. The majority of secondary school students in countries as varied as the U.S., Norway, and South Korea report in surveys sleeping less than 8 hours on weeknights.
Many compensate by catching up on sleep on the weekends, with those aged 9-18 sleeping an average of 1.5 hours more on weekend nights – the average peaking at 2.1 hours more at age 15.
At the same time, sleep regularity, not just duration, is important. Does sleeping in on the weekend help adolescents offset any potential ill effects of insufficient sleep? Or does it make matters worse by throwing off their sleep patterns and circadian rhythms?
Why sleep matters for adolescents
In adolescents, sleep problems like insomnia or regularly getting insufficient sleep are linked to depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, poor decision-making and difficulty with concentration, as well as worse quality of life overall. These risks rise the shorter the sleep or the worse the sleep problems.
Yet with demands of school, work, and socializing, many teenagers struggle to get the recommended amount. Their circadian rhythm compounds the challenge by shifting later in adolescence (one reason why making school start times later may be beneficial). “This is a developmental period where sleep biology, and social and academic demands, are really misaligned,” says So Jeong Kim, doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Oregon’s Oregon Sleep Lab. “They’re biologically wired to fall asleep later, but at the same time, they often have to wake up early for school. This mismatch makes it really easy for them to become chronically sleep deprived.”
“Sleep regularity, not just duration, is important.”
The benefits of catch-up sleep
The good news is that some catch-up sleep appears to blunt negative effects of insufficient weekday sleep. In a 2025 study of 16- to 24-year-olds, for example, weekend catch-up sleep was associated with a 41% lower risk of depressive symptoms. Meanwhile, in a 2022 study of 12- to 18-year-olds, the highest risk of depressive symptoms was in adolescents who slept less than five hours on weeknights and had less than an hour’s extra sleep on weekend nights.
However, questions persist. For example, if adolescents already sleep 8-10 hours on weekdays, is weekend catch-up sleep still beneficial? And does the timing of weekday sleep matter? Researchers including Kim investigated these factors in more than 1,800 adolescents using Fitbit watches.
They found a sweet spot: Adolescents who got up to 2 hours of weekend catch-up sleep per night had roughly half the odds of developing clinical-level anxiety symptoms compared with those who got no catch-up sleep, Kim says. They also did a little bit better than adolescents who got more than 2 hours of catch-up sleep.
This range also was associated with the lowest risk of depressive symptoms, although the effect was smaller. Interestingly, getting enough sleep during the week did not erase the impacts of catch-up sleep.
“Even when we accounted for weekday sleep duration and timing, like the average time that they went to sleep on weekdays, the association with anxiety stayed [statistically] significant,” Kim says. “And when we looked at average weekday sleep duration independently, it wasn’t associated with anxiety or depressive symptoms.”
The sweet spot of catch-up sleep
Like Kim’s study, other research indicates that it’s good to catch up on sleep, but not too much.
A 2023 study, for example, found that when adolescents regularly slept in more than an hour on weekends, they had more depressive symptoms and were sleepier during the day a year later. According to a 2022 survey of more than 270,000 adolescents, the optimal range might be a little bigger. Those who had the lowest risk of depression slept up to 1.5 times more on weekends – that’s 10.5 hours for a 7-hour weeknight sleeper.
The U-shaped curve makes sense, Kim says. “By sleeping in too much on weekends, your internal clock gets delayed, then on Sunday night, you might struggle to fall asleep, and Monday morning feels brutal,” she says. “So it’s not that sleeping in a bit is bad. It’s that when you swing too far, you might be putting your body in a perpetual state of catch-up. And that instability and rhythm can affect mental health over time.”
“Getting sufficient sleep during the week is important, as is going to bed at roughly the same time each night, including weekends.”
Why age might matter
However, there are some caveats. Most studies exploring adolescent catch-up sleep have looked at mental health. It’s possible that sleep patterns aren’t impacting mental health problems, but rather that adolescents predisposed to these symptoms also tend to have different sleep patterns. Or it may be that teenagers who are experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety spend more time sleeping because of their mental health challenges.
It’s also possible that catch-up sleep affects other outcomes, such as academic performance, differently.
One of the few studies of how sleep patterns affect academic outcomes raises another potential caveat: While 1-2 hours of catch-up sleep might help older adolescents, it may backfire, at least on cognition, for younger ones. In more than 6,300 9- and 10-year-olds, those who had catch-up sleep of an hour or more were no more likely to have symptoms of depression, anxiety or behavioral problems. But they were more likely to perform poorly on intelligence and academic measures – even after controlling for other sleep measures, socioeconomic status, and physical health.
In another study, 10- to 12-year-olds who had sufficient sleep on weeknights and slept in an hour or more on weekends had poorer executive function than those who didn’t sleep in.
The bottom line? Getting sufficient sleep during the week is important, as is going to bed at roughly the same time each night, including weekends. But whether older adolescents, in particular, manage this or not, there may be no harm – and perhaps some benefit – in allowing them to sleep in an extra hour or two on the weekend.
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