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...