If you sleep terribly (or miss an entire night of sleep) you accumulate sleep debt. That debt isn’t easy to pay back, as it’s not a matter of simply napping an hour a day until you’ve caught up. The complete sleep cycle is necessary to net the full benefits of a night’s shut-eye. So while you can top-up your wakefulness a bit after the fact, that negative line on your balance sheet may never be 100% zeroed-out.
Any kind of bad habit or unaddressed issue can lead to the accumulation of similar debts. Unhealthy eating, not exercising or stretching, not developing and maintaining relationships of various sorts, not learning and trying new things: they can all result in negative consequences that, in addition to being not great unto themselves, also accrue interest. So after the initial negative whammy, they can also lead to dissipating friend groups, deteriorating health, an ever-shrinking range of movement, and an increasingly myopic sense of what’s happening and possible in an ever-changing world.
We all have different capacities and limitations, and our ambitions will tend to be capped by our baselines and circumstances. It’s not possible to get a perfect night’s sleep (whatever that means for our unique biologies) every night, and it’s not possible to always be upbeat and friendly, to eat nothing but perfectly healthy foods, and to always be pushing ourselves beyond our current kens and comfort levels.
Investing in ourselves and our lives usually results in positive interest accrual, thankfully, netting us all sorts of benefits in addition to staving off (or tempering the impact of) debt. And that’s important since, again, the accumulation of some debts is unavoidable, and the consequences for not confronting those debts can be significant and life-shaping.
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