Social Jet Lag: Why Your Weekend Sleep Habit Isn’t Helping

Ever find yourself staying up later on the weekends, then dragging through Monday like you’ve flown cross-country? That mismatch between your weekday and weekend sleep schedules has a name: social jet lag—and it’s not great for your health.

In a study our CEO (Olivia Walch) co-authored, they looked at Twitter activity (a rough stand-in for wakefulness) and saw a clear pattern: when people had fewer social obligations—like during school breaks—their sleep schedules smoothed out. Weekdays looked more like weekends. Their body’s internal clocks stopped yo-yoing.

The takeaway? When we’re free from alarms and early meetings, we naturally shift into more consistent sleep patterns. And that consistency isn’t just nice—it’s important. Research suggests regular sleep-wake timing may be just as crucial as how long you sleep.

Arcashift is built to help you find that consistency, even when life isn’t giving you a break. By aligning your schedule with your body’s internal clock, it helps reduce social jet lag and makes waking up on Monday feel much less brutal.

Because sleep isn’t just about how much you get—it’s about when you get it.