We’ve all been there: It’s been a long week at work, so
Friday night, you reward yourself by going to bed early and sleeping in. But when
you wake up the next morning (or afternoon), light hurts your eyes, and your
legs feel like they’re filled with sand. Your brain is still sleeping and you
even have faint headache. If too little sleep is a problem, then why is extra
sleep a terrible solution?
Oversleeping feels so much like a hangover that
scientists call it sleep drunkenness. But, unlike the brute force neurological
damage caused by alcohol, your misguided attempt to stock up on rest makes you
feel sluggish by confusing the part of your brain that controls your body’s
daily cycle.
Your internal rhythms are set by your circadian
pacemaker, a group of cells clustered in the hypothalamus, a primitive little
part of the brain that also controls hunger, thirst, and sweat. Primarily
triggered by light signals from your eye, the pacemaker figures out when it’s
morning and sends out chemical messages keeping the rest of the cells in your
body on the same clock.
Scientists believe that the pacemaker evolved to tell the
cells in our bodies how to regulate their energy on a daily basis. When you
sleep too much, you’re throwing off that biological clock, and it starts
telling the cells a different story than what they’re actually experiencing,
inducing a sense of fatigue. You might be crawling out of bed at 11 am, but your
cells started using their energy cycle at seven. This is similar to how jet lag
works.
But oversleep isn’t just going to ruin your Saturday
hike. If you’re oversleeping on the regular, you could be putting yourself at
risk for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Harvard’s massive Nurses Health
Study found that people who slept 9 to 11 hours a night developed memory
problems and were more likely to develop heart disease than people who slept a
solid eight. (Undersleepers are at an even bigger risk). Other studies have
linked oversleep to diabetes, obesity, and even early death.
Oversleep doesn’t just happen as a misguided attempt at
rewarding yourself. The Harvard Nurses Study estimated that chronic oversleep
affects about 4 percent of the population. These are generally people who work
odd hours, have an uncomfortable sleep situation, or a sleeping disorder.
People who work early morning or overnight shifts might
be oversleeping to compensate for waking up before the sun rises or going to
sleep when it’s light out. Doctors recommend using dark curtains and artificial
lights to straighten things out rather than medication or supplements. Apps
like the University of Michigan’s Entrain can also help people reset their
circadian clock by logging the amount and type of light they get throughout the
day.
When you go to bed, your body cycles between different
sleep stages. Your muscles, bones, and other tissues do their repair work
during deep sleep, before you enter REM. However, if your bed or bedroom is
uncomfortable—too hot or cold, messy, or lumpy—your body will spend more time
in light, superficial sleep. Craving rest, you’ll sleep longer.
If everything’s just fine with your sleep zone but you
still can’t get under the eight hour mark, you might need to go see a doctor.
It could be a symptom of narcolepsy, which makes it hard for your body to
regulate fatigue and makes you sleep in more. Sleep apnea is a potentially more
serious disorder where you stop breathing while you slumber. It’s typically
caused by an obstructed airway, which leads to snoring. However, in a small
number of sufferers, the brain simply stops telling the muscles to breathe,
starving the brain and eventually forcing a gasping response. In addition to
all the other terrifying aspects of this disease, it’s not doing your quality
of sleep any favors.
No surprise, drugs and alcohol might also be causing you
to sleep too much, as does being depressed (In fact, oversleep can contribute
to even more depression). But no matter what’s causing it, too much sleep is
not good for your long term health. Rather than kicking the can down the road,
try getting some equilibrium between your weekend and weekday sleep.
ProlargentSize
biological clock,
diabetes,
early death,
erectile dysfunction,
little sleep,
obesity,
Oversleep,
premature ejaculation,
prolargent size,
prolargentsize,
sleep drunkenness,
too much sleep,
undersleep