January 14, 2026
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Teenagers who catch up on sleep deficits by sleeping in on Saturdays and Sundays have a lower risk of depression than teens that do not, new research shows.
Parents trying to oust their teenagers from bed on the weekends should start letting them roll over and pull the covers back up, a new study suggests.
Teens who use the weekend to catch up on sleep lost during the week have a 41% lower risk of depression than those who do not sleep in on Saturdays and Sundays, the new research shows. It is set to be published Feb. 1 in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
With depression rates having risen among adolescents over the past 20 years, and with close links between sleep deprivation and depression, researchers set out to see if using the weekend to make up for lost sleep offers teens any protection against the mental health condition. Previous research looked at how weekend sleep impacted teens in other countries, but this was the first study to examine the issue among U.S. teens, the University of Oregon researchers said.
Due to shifting circadian rhythms, adolescents naturally tend to stay up later at night and wake up later in the morning. But early school start times and extracurricular activities often result in teens not being able to clock the recommended 8 to 10 hours of sleep each night.
To help assess whether catching up on sleep helps improve teens' mental health, the researchers used data from 2021-2023 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It included responses from 16- to 24-year-olds who reported when they went to bed and woke up. The researchers used the difference between weekday and weekend sleep to calculate catch-up sleep.
Getting 8-10 hours of sleep each night was best, but teens who got two hours of extra sleep on the weekends were less likely to get depressed than those who did not.
"It's normal for teens to be night owls," said Melynda Casement, one of the lead researchers and a University of Oregon psychologist. "So let them catch up on sleep on weekends if they can't get enough sleep during the week, because that's likely to be somewhat protective."
