Sleeping in — but not too much — may ease anxiety

For many teens, Saturday mornings are a time to snooze. After a week of getting up early, the weekend brings a chance to catch up on much-needed slumber. And sleeping in on the weekend may reduce anxiety, a new study finds — as long as teens don’t tack on more than two extra hours of shut-eye.

It might seem like a good idea to get as much sleep as possible on the weekend. Sleep is essential for a fully functioning brain and body — especially for adolescents. And 75 percent of American teens don’t get the recommended eight to 10 hours per night. School, homework and other weekday activities require them to rise early. Teens’ circadian rhythm also makes it difficult to fall asleep before 11 p.m.

Yet past research has hinted that too much sleep on the weekend can lead to health issues. Those studies had found a possible connection between catch-up sleep and depression. But the link hadn’t been carefully studied. What’s more, no one had looked at another major aspect of mental health — anxiety — in relation to sleep.

That got Sojeong Kim curious. Kim is a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She set out to investigate how catch-up sleep might be related to anxiety.

Finding the sweet spot

Kim used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. This study has  been following thousands of kids and teens from across the United States to learn how their brains develop over time.

For her study, Kim focused on data collected from teens when they were 12 to 15 years old. That’s around the age that people start having trouble getting enough sleep, she explains. It’s “harder for teens to fall asleep early and wake up in the morning.”

The data included sleep and activity patterns for nearly 1,900 young people. These data came from a Fitbit each participant wore during the study. Participants had also filled out questionnaires about their feelings of anxiety and depression. Kim studied those, too.

Let’s learn about sleep

Teens who slept in on weekends reported the lowest symptoms of anxiety, but only if they got less than two hours of extra shut-eye. Teens who didn’t sleep in — or lost sleep on the weekend — reported higher anxiety levels. Those who slept more than two additional hours had the highest anxiety symptoms of all.

Anxious teens experienced neck tension — a common sign of stress. They also reported excessive worries, fears and guilt.

Kim shared her findings at the SLEEP 2025 conference in Seattle, Wash., on June 11.

“The results show a possible link between sleeping a little more on weekends and feeling less anxious,” says Christopher Depner. “But we still need more research to know for sure.” Depner, who was not involved in the work, studies sleep and circadian rhythms at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

One limit of the new research is that it was an observational study, Depner says. An observational study is one where researchers simply observe something happening in the world. They don’t set up an experiment and control variables to test a hypothesis about how it works.

“The scientists just watched how people sleep without asking them to try any new sleep habits or treatments,” Depner points out. Having people follow different sleep schedules and then measuring their mental health could help clarify how one affects the other.

Preventing social jet lag

If there is a link between just the right amount of catch-up sleep and anxiety — why? What would make someone who gets more than two hours of extra sleep more anxious?

Kim suspects that having big swings between weekday and weekend sleep schedules creates what scientists call social jet lag.

Explainer: What is anxiety?

Like jet lag triggered by traveling between time zones, social jet lag causes grogginess and a foggy brain. It happens when our body’s clock is out of sync with our sleep cycle. Switching from too little sleep to too much is a known trigger. Although Kim’s study didn’t investigate this as a cause, she suspects it’s part of the problem.

Kim didn’t find a clear link between catch-up sleep and symptoms of depression. That might be due to the age group Kim studied. “Usually, depressive symptoms onset later in adolescence,” she says. Anxiety, on the other hand, tends to start when teens are younger. Kim’s next step is to study weekend catch-up sleep among older teens.

For now, she wants teens to know there can be benefits to catch-up sleep. “Getting a little extra sleep on weekends might help [you] feel less anxious,” she says. “But not too much, because it can give you the opposite effect.”