First week back from São Paulo, and the sleep debt is real. Flight was brutal, timezone shift
that brutal feeling is legit, no question. I’ve started pushing back on the “sleep debt” framing for myself though, bc it implies a simple payback model that isn’t really what’s happening physiologically. The actual problem is the hormonal desynchronization.
Ghrelin runs meaningfully higher on restricted sleep, and leptin suppression follows. That’s not a “debt” you can repay in one weekend, it’s a signaling disruption that takes several consistent nights to fully reset. For me, the first sign things are normalizing isn’t the sleep score on my wearable, it’s when my baseline hunger signaling feels stable again.
That’s usually the more reliable metric ime. 📊