Trying to Recover From Sleep Debt? This Type of Exercise May Help

Don’t worry, it involves a very low time commitment.

January 6, 2026

treadmill on pink background with alarm clock

The beginning of a new year can wipe the slate clean for fresh life and work goals—but if your holidays were hectic, you might not be starting at zero when it comes to your sleep. Missing out on even small chunks of sleep for a few nights can snowball into sleep debt that you could be lugging into 2026. While you probably can’t snooze enough to disappear that deficit, you can take steps to support the parts of your body that bear the biggest burden.

Some of the consequences of owing your body sleep are readily apparent, like feeling drowsy, irritable, or brain-foggy, or catching seemingly every virus. But other effects can be less noticeable, like, for instance, the impact on your cardiovascular system, which builds with time. “Sleep debt raises inflammation and stress hormones, which puts extra strain on the heart and blood vessels, increasing your risk of high blood pressure and heart disease,” Angela Holliday-Bell, MD, a board-certified physician and sleep specialist, tells SELF.

Piling onto these detriments is the metabolic fallout: Skimping on sleep (even for just a night or two) can dampen your sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that tells your cells to soak up sugar from your blood, which raises your blood glucose levels. That ups your risk for type 2 diabetes, amplifying the assault on your heart, and it also impairs your brain’s ability to create energy from glucose, Louisa Nicola, MMed, a New York–based neurophysiologist who studies Alzheimer’s disease in women, tells SELF. Over time, that can make your brain less resilient against stressors like illness and aging, speeding up changes tied to dementia.

Getting out of sleep debt can be trickier than it seems.

Much like wracking up credit card debt, the greater your sleep deficit, the tougher it can be to repay it and get back to baseline. Consider a scenario where you get one hour less sleep than you need every night during the week, meaning that come the weekend, you’d have to sleep an extra five hours to make up for the deficit. “The problem is, our ability to sleep is not just determined by our homeostatic sleep drive, or how tired you feel based on how long you’ve been awake,” Jennifer Martin, PhD, spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and professor at Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University, tells SELF. “It’s also governed by our circadian rhythm, which will not just allow us to sleep five hours later than normal to account for that debt.”

Even trying to recoup more than a couple hours of sleep debt over the course of a weekend is challenging when your internal clock wants you to wake up at your typical time, Dr. Martin adds. And if you do manage to snooze a good bit extra on your days off, it still “will not fully erase the impact on the body of days of insufficient sleep,” Dr. Holliday-Bell notes. As with monetary debt, avoiding sleep debt in the first place will always be easier than paying it off.

If some amount of sleep debt is a given for you, a burst of high-intensity exercise may help you recover.

Sometimes, missing out on sleep for a few days or longer is all but unavoidable, say, because of a tough patch at work or the reality of life as a new parent. Or maybe you’re struggling with insomnia and despite your best efforts, you’re coming up short. You probably know how to temporarily jolt yourself into alertness—cold water to the face, a walk outside, an extra-caffeinated beverage. But research suggests you might want to embrace a small dose of high-intensity exercise too. It could go further than combatting sleepiness, also helping to partially offset some of the repercussions of sleep debt on the body.

A few recent studies comparing the effects of sleep loss in people who did high-intensity interval training (HIIT)—either before, during, or after a period of sleep restriction—versus those who didn’t found that the HIIT groups showed better metabolic outcomes (like less insulin resistance). We know from prior research that speedy HIIT sessions of 10–15 minutes can have outsize benefits for blood-sugar control (versus longer sessions of low-intensity exercise). So it makes sense that HIIT might also counter some of the metabolic issues that can occur when you’re running on insufficient sleep, Dr. Holliday-Bell says.

That has trickle-up benefits for your brain too, Nicola points out. Counteracting the dip in insulin sensitivity that comes with poor sleep allows more glucose to make it to your brain, which can then more efficiently produce the energy it needs to function well, she explains. Vigorous exercise like HIIT also enhances blood flow to your brain and triggers the release of chemicals like brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), Dr. Holliday-Bell says, all of which can support cognition. Indeed, some research suggests doing HIIT before a night of restricted sleep can soften the negative impact of sleep loss on memory, allowing for better recall than if you were just sleep-deprived and hadn’t done the workout.

Long-term, however, nothing can fully replace the benefits of sleep for both mind and body.

The experts emphasize that while HIIT can support the body systems most affected by sleep deprivation, it can’t undo all the downsides of sleep loss. Not to mention, if you’re really sleep-deprived and drowsy, your probability of getting injured during HIIT goes up, Dr. Martin adds. (Your body also needs sleep after HIIT to resolve the temporary spike in inflammation and micro-tears in your muscles that the workout sparks, so you can reap all the benefits.)

All to say, good health still hinges on good sleep. Since you can’t exactly pay back sleep debt beyond a couple hours’ deficit, Dr. Martin suggests just starting to meet your baseline sleep need whenever you can—that’s generally between seven and nine hours a night for adults. To figure out your personal number, “consider how long you generally sleep on the third day of a vacation,” Dr. Martin says, when you’ve decompressed a bit and have no obligations requiring you to stay up late or wake up early.

To make it easiest for your body to get your ideal amount of sleep, prioritize going to bed and waking up at the same time each day (yes, even on weekends). This kind of sleep regularity keeps your circadian rhythm chugging along smoothly, which can have positive effects on many body systems, and even contributes to your overall longevity, Nicola says.

If you’re already prioritizing sleep and carving out enough time for it, but you can’t seem to actually get it, then it’s worth brushing up on your sleep hygiene (for instance, embracing a pre-sleep ritual and avoiding screens before bed) and checking in with your doctor.

But ultimately, the occasional off-kilter night isn’t something to stress over. Your body is capable of bouncing back—and a quick HIIT session could offer a helpful boost on that front.