On average, a person needs about eight hours a night to preserve performance.Acute sleep loss is being awake for more than 24 hours in a row and chronic sleep loss is getting only about four to seven hours of sleep per night.
While most people caught up on acute sleep loss with a single night of 10 hours sleep, those with chronic sleep loss showed deteriorating performance for each hour spent awake.
People are largely unaware that they are chronically sleep-deprived but they are more vulnerable to sudden sleepiness, inattentiveness, and potentially, accidents and errors.
Three days is not enough to recover from chronic sleep loss, but they still do not know how many days or weeks may be needed.
References:
Chronic sleep loss hampers performance. Reuters, 2010.
Image source: Sleeping kitten. Wikipedia, Tilman Piesk, public domain.
