You may be one of the many people who really enjoy sleeping. Lying in a comfortable bed all day is a pleasure, rather than doing other tiring activities. However, doing this can actually be dangerous. What are the dangers of sleeping too long? Check out the following article.
Sleep is necessary because when we sleep we recharge our batteries, oxygenate our body and give our mind a well-deserved rest. Doctors advise sleeping between 7 and 8 hours a day, but although science says that this time is more than enough to face the day with energy, many times we are tempted to stay in bed for a long time.
We know that lack of sleep is detrimental to our health and, now, several studies agree that sleeping long hours can also have negative consequences.
Excess sleep is an indicator of poor health. That is, when we spend hours and hours in bed and still remain tired, something is wrong with our bodies. Although the reason can also be in a poor quality of sleep motivated by external factors: diet, lack of exercise, night habits…
Sleeping or eating are two basic functions inherent to human beings and necessary for their survival, and, in both cases, both the abuse and the lack of these habits can be detrimental to our health.
Sleeping Too Much: Negative Effects and Risks
Sleeping is, as we have indicated, a basic need. And taking this into account, when we talk about sleeping more than normal, most people could consider that we are facing something beneficial and that it allows more and better rest. However, the truth is that like not sleeping, sleeping a lot (more than nine or ten hours a day) has also been linked to the appearance of different problems or an increased risk of suffering from them.
In short, and although it is not usual, you can sleep too much, enough so that it is not healthy: sleeping a lot is bad for us. Among the different risks of sleeping more than nine or ten hours a day we find the following.
Various Dangers of Sleeping Too Long
In general, sleep is the best way to restore the body’s condition to return to health and fitness. However, that does not mean you can sleep all day without doing other activities. As with lack of sleep, excessive sleep is also not good for health. Therefore, the best thing is to get enough sleep in portions.
Sleeping too long can cause health hazards, including:
1. Having A Headache
Have you ever slept more than 12 hours? This can cause the brain to if dewy and headaches arise. Yes, this condition can be one of the dangers that you may experience if you sleep too long.
When you sleep, your body does not get fluids for up to 12 hours more. That’s why you may become dehydrated during sleep and wake up feeling a headache due to a lack of fluids.
2. Causes Pain All Over The Body
One of the dangers that you may experience when you sleep too long is that your whole body feels sore. This condition can happen because when you sleep you don’t do much movement.
However, this can also happen if you sleep on an uncomfortable mattress. Imagine if you have to sleep a dozen hours on a mattress that is not soft and cannot support your body properly. Of course, bone pain and muscle pain will be felt throughout the body.
3. Increases The Risk Of Diabetes
One of the dangers that you may experience when you sleep too long is the increased risk of developing diabetes. This condition can occur either when you are sleep-deprived or sleeping too long. Therefore, it is very important to regulate your sleep cycle.
A study carried out by researchers from the Medical Center of the Free University of Amsterdam, verified how in men who sleep less or more hours than recommended, the cells have a lower capacity to respond, so they do not capture enough glucose. From this, it can be deduced that these people have a higher risk of suffering from diabetes than the men who sleep the 7 hours a day indicated by the study.
4. Damage Your Heart
When you sleep too long, it means you spend a lot of time being inactive, which is a risk factor for both, diabetes and heart disease. Sleeping more than eight hours a night increases the chances of dying from a heart problem by 34%. This indirectly increases the risk of obesity-associated with an increase in both diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. Women tend to sleep more than men, which puts them in a more vulnerable position and increases the risk of developing heart problems.
5. Increases The Risk Of Obesity
Too much sleep can also pose a danger to your body weight. This unhealthy habit also has the potential to cause weight gain to obesity. Logically, when you sleep too much, your body rarely moves, let alone exercises. This causes the risk of obesity to increases. In fact, even though you are still exercising regularly, you are still prone to weight gain if you sleep too much.
As a study by the University of Laval in Quebec showed people who slept nine hours or more for six years were 25% more likely to gain five kilos – whatever exercise they did and even eat a balanced diet – than those who slept just enough. According to experts, there are other causes that might trigger this to happen.
6. Increase The Risk Of Stroke
In addition to heart disease, stroke is also one of the dangers that you may experience if you sleep too long. In fact, lack of sleep can also cause you to experience this condition. This has also been proven by a study in 2017.
According to the study, the duration of sleep is very significant on the risk of stroke. Therefore, both sleep deprivation and oversleeping increase your chances of developing one of these deadly diseases.
Although there are doubts as to why it has been observed that those people who throughout life usually sleep more than nine or more hours a day have an increased risk of suffering from some type of stroke. There is research by the University of Cambridge to analyze the sleep patterns of 10,000 people between the ages of 42 and 81, states that those who sleep more than 8 hours a day are 46% more likely to suffer a stroke or cerebral infarction than people with a normative amount of sleep. Researchers are not clear why.
Also, it should be taken into account that excessive sleep could not be the cause of the increase in said probability, but rather a prodrome or a sign that something could be going wrong at the vascular level.
7. Disrupt Fertility
In both women and men, too much sleep can interfere with fertility. This is certainly one of the dangers of sleeping too long that you may experience. Similar to lack of sleep, this condition can also affect hormone levels in the body.
Too little or too much sleep can affect a man’s ability to get his partner pregnant, new research suggests. Among the 790 couples the researchers followed, it found that short and long sleep durations (less than 6 hours and starting at 9 hours per night) were associated with a lower chance of pregnancy.
Using 8 hours of sleep as a benchmark, men who slept less than 6 or more than 9 hours each night had a 42 percent lower chance of conceiving in a given month. Fertility experts know that testosterone is crucial for reproduction, and most of the testosterone released daily in men is produced during sleep. In turn, total sleep time has been positively linked to testosterone levels in several studies.
Meanwhile, hormone levels are closely related to fertility. Therefore, if you don’t want your fertility to be compromised, it’s better to adopt healthy sleep habits and don’t oversleep.
8. Experiencing Depression
Apparently, people who sleep too long can have problems with their mental health. Yes, it turns out that one of the dangers of sleeping too long is mental health disorders, one of which is depression. However, this condition is still quite confusing for experts. Because experts still can’t determine whether this habit of sleeping too long is due to depression, or vice versa?
What is clear, these two things are interrelated. If you sleep too long, the chances of experiencing depression will be even greater. Depression leads to inactivity, drowsiness, and fatigue that can lead to more sleep during the day.
Sleeping for long hours alters the secretion of serotonin, the neurotransmitter popularly known as the ‘happiness hormone’, which can cause bad moods and also headaches.
The mood can also be altered by a lack or excess of sleep.
9. Aggravating Anxiety Disorders
People who have anxiety disorders do have a tendency to sleep too little or too long. Some feel the anxiety they experience makes it even more difficult to sleep. However, there are also those who feel anxious to sleep too long as a way of running away from reality.
Even so, when you wake up from sleep, this condition actually worsens the anxiety disorder that occurs. This causes the expected effect of sleeping too long to be also not felt.
10. Alters Cognitive Ability and Concentration
It has been observed that, as occurs when we sleep too little, excessive sleep seems to reduce our cognitive capacity, observing an inverted U-shaped pattern in which sleeping too much or too little generates deficits in different mental capacities. In this sense, it has been observed in different studies that people who chronically sleep too much tend to suffer a certain deterioration of their mental and cognitive functions.
It is also a risk factor for the development of some dementias. Among others, it seems to especially affect reasoning and verbal ability, with a possible short-term memory impairment not being so evident. The results, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, conclude that people who sleep longer have a faster cognitive decline, which could lead to the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Not only will it be difficult for you to concentrate, but also to coordinate and carry out your basic functions. The reason that people who sleep too much have problems with basic mental functioning may lie in the number of times they wake up during the night. If they wake up frequently, they are probably not reaching the deep state of sleep necessary for the body to restore itself.
11. Ages the Brain and Can Promote Mental Deterioration
It has been observed that sleeping too much contributes to the aging of the brain, in addition to having demonstrated the existence of a relationship between excessive sleep and cognitive deterioration, favoring the latter. If we pass the nine-hour sleep barrier, our brain becomes lethargic to such an extent that it can make us feel blurry.
In that case, it is clear that we have overslept. For once we do not have to be alarmed, but we do it very often we must bear in mind that, according to research published in the ‘Journal of the American Geriatrics Society’, sleeping too much can make our brain age two more years. Chronic prolonged sleep can age your brain at a faster rate.
This premature aging can cause difficulties in the optimal development of daily activities, according to the research published in the Journal of the Geriatric Society of the United States.
12. Generates More Drowsiness and “Hangover”
Many people will have observed that after an excessively long night’s sleep they wake up slightly confused, in fact as if they had slept less than normal. The truth is that sleeping excessively tends to generate even more drowsiness, something called a sleep hangover.
Not only that, but it is also common for us to feel dizzy, weak, and with a headache. The exact reason is unknown, although some proposals may be the fact that this causes us to have a worse quality and more superficial sleep, and that we wake up in one of the phases in which we should be in deep sleep.
13. Risk of Premature Death
Nor is it that mattress manufacturer have to put on their products a warning similar to that of tobacco with something like “sleep kills”, but the truth is that different epidemiological macro studies have shown that people who sleep too much are more likely to die early. It sounds radical but it is a reality.
Apparently, the reason could be explained in some of the derived risks that we have been discussing, such as being overweight, heart disease, or diabetes, directly related to excess (or insufficient) sleep. Finally, it has been observed that in general, people who sleep excessively have a worse state of health and life prognosis compared to those who sleep between seven and eight hours a day.
Tips For Better Sleep
To get enough sleep (no more and no less) and get a good night’s sleep, these simple tips will be very helpful:
Follow, as much as possible, a sleep routine: go to bed and get up at the same time every time.
Regular exercise helps maintain that routine. Check it out: go out one day for a run and you’ll see how you sleep wonderfully that night.
Avoid large dinners before going to bed, and also vice versa: never go to bed hungry. Ideally, eat dinner at least 3 hours before bedtime.
Drinking alcohol can make you drowsy, but your sleep won’t be restorative – avoid it.
It will be easier for you to fall asleep if before going to bed you practice relaxing activities such as taking a hot bath, reading a book, listening to soft music.
It is not advisable to watch television or play with the tablet, since the screens of these devices reveal us.
Try not to enter the vicious circle of bad night-long nap-bad night. The idea is to sleep between 20 and 40 minutes of nap, avoid lengthening them more so as to be sleepy when it is time to sleep.
