Sleep Tank Hypothesis

 Sleep scientists claim there's a maximum amount of sleep you can lose, and I unfortunately found out they're wrong. Every hour of sleep you lose, you must gain back again later if you want to achieve good health. 1 for 1. Sadly it's asymptotic; the amount of debt you can pay back is proportional to the amount of debt there is. I ended up sleeping 13-14 hours a day for a year, and the next year it only went down to like 11-10. 

 

 Sleep loss is also not monolithic. I model it as three tanks, two sized at one night or so and the third simply a huge aquifer. If you miss one night of sleep, you simply go to the second tank, and you'll hardly notice, with the caveat that tank-switching only occurs while unconscious. You only suffer major sleep deprivation from missing sleep one night if the second tank is also depleted.  Likewise if you fully refill the second tank and start refilling the first, you'll be groggy that day, working off the half-empty first tank.

 Losing exactly two nights of sleep doesn't feel too bad either. Losing a little bit more doesn't feel as bad as trying to refill a tank and getting woken up partway through, and each marginal loss in the big tank seems minor. However, symptoms can get aggravated indefinitely until you're at least years behind on sleep. 

 Refilling the big tank also results in grogginess, with the result that missing a night of sleep or at least a substantial number of hours, causing a tank-switch to the first full tank can alleviate depression symptoms and generally give a temporary boost.

 

 On the plus side, suffering concussion symptoms every day due to radical sleep deprivation makes it much easier to deal with stupid people due to failing to notice how stupid they're being. If you can't make them stop, why not try knowing no better? 

 P.S. The [13 hours sleep + minimal wakeful time] regime was a real trip. Usually 12 hours awake but, shockingly, someone this sleep-deprived wasn't good at keeping a routine, so I don't know how much the many solecisms contributed. Rather than being awake and doing maintenance on stuff while asleep, I basically did mandatory wakefulness-time-cycles maintenance so I could get back to sleep ASAP. If the body wasn't set up weird I would only have woken up for meals. Every "day" was reverse-nap time, and reverse-nap time has a most odd gutfeel to it.