I don't get enough sleep, and wearing an Oura Ring 5 to bed every night has perfectly captured that fact. Since getting my hands on the gold-standard sleep tracker, I've woken up pretty much every day to metrics highlighted in scolding red, urging me to get more than my typical 6 hours of sleep a night.The Oura Ring is the best sleep tracker on the market, and one of its unique metrics is its Sleep Debt counter, which tells you how many hour and minutes of sleep you've missed."Sleep debt is the difference between the amount of sleep your body needs and the amount you actually get over time," says Dr. Shelby Harris, a licensed Clinical Psychologist and Behavioral Sleep Medicine Specialist at BetterSleep. "If you consistently need around eight hours but only sleep six, you're accumulating roughly two hours of sleep debt each night."She's right. According to the Oura Ring, the amount of sleep debt I owe is sky high. But is there a way I can repay it? To find out, I asked Dr. Harris to create me a sleep schedule to go from six hours of sleep a night to seven. Here's what happened to my sleep debt after following this plan for a week...Key takeaways: Paying your sleep debt at a glance Sleep debt is the difference between the amount of sleep your body needs and the amount you actually get over time.To repay sleep debt, you have need to stick to a consistent sleep schedule that encourages earlier nights.Wake up at the same time: Keep your alarm set for the exact same time every day (even on weekends) to maintain your internal clock and avoid "social jet lag."Gradually go to bed earlier: Reduce sleep debt by going to bed 15–30 minutes earlier every two nights rather than trying to force a drastic, sudden change.Factor in sleep latency: Head to bed 10–20 minutes before your target sleep time to account for the time it takes you to fall asleep once you're in bed.Trust long-term progress: You may not see any progress initially, but sticking to the sleep schedule despite setbacks could lead to decreasing sleep debt by over an hour in just one week.My sleep before trying Dr Harris's sleep scheduleBedtime: 12:25AMFell asleep: 12:36AMTotal sleep time: 5 hours 41 minutesSleep debt: 8 hours and 50 minutes (accumulated over six weeks)Before I dive into Dr. Harris’s sleep schedule, let's look at the sleep habits that drove me to seek out specialist advice in the first place.The night before I started the sleep plan, my Oura Ring recorded a bedtime of 12.25am and a total of 5 hours and 41 minutes of sleep (resulting in an insufficient amount of REM sleep), while my average monthly sleep duration was 6 hours exactly.