Do you fall asleep easily, and find yourself sleeping for 10 hours or more each night? While it’s nice to get an extra hour of sleep on a Sunday morning, if you’re regularly sleeping for more than the recommended hours of sleep per night, you could actually be doing more harm than good.
How Much Should You Sleep?
It’s recommended that adults sleep between 7 to 9 hours each night. This is the average amount of rest your body needs to recover from the previous day, and spend adequate time in both deep sleep and REM sleep. Sleep gives your energy, strengthens your immune system, regulates hormones, and consolidates short term memories into long term memories. After a good night’s sleep, you’ll feel alert and creative, easily solving a problem that was bothering you the night before.
If you sleep less than 7 hours per night, you’ll soon start to notice the negative effects of fatigue. You’ll have a hard time focusing on tasks, you’re more likely to be irritable or moody, lose appetite or overeat, and weaken your immune system.
What Happens When You Oversleep?
Not sleeping enough has some major consequences, but oversleeping is also bad for your health! There are a few people that need 10 hours of sleep to feel well rested, but most adults who consistently sleep 10 hours or more are oversleeping.
If you sleep too much, it’s a sign that something isn’t quite right, and you may have an undetected health issue. Not only that, but sleeping more than 10 hours per night on a regular basis can lead to an increase of headaches, back pain, a higher risk of obesity, and even heart disease. Have you been oversleeping? Consult with your doctor or a sleep specialist if you’ve noticed a change in your sleep habits.
Reasons You May Be Oversleeping
There are a few reasons you may be oversleeping. Any illness or health condition that leads to poor sleep quality can make you feel tired and groggy in the morning, or make you oversleep. Depression, anxiety, a cold or flu, infections, or gastrointestinal diseases could all make you feel drowsy, and encourage you to stay in bed an extra hour or two. Sleep apnea can also cause oversleeping. When sleep apnea disrupts your breathing during the night you wake up repeatedly, and this poor sleep quality makes you tired during the day.
Oversleeping and Your Metabolism
Excessive sleep could affect your metabolism. Along with the health issues that can accompany oversleeping, spending too many hours of sleep may lead to metabolic syndrome. If you’ve been sleeping more than 10 hours per night, you’re more likely to have metabolic syndrome, and have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Metabolic syndrome is a group of risk factors that greatly increase your chances of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Metabolic syndrome is not an illness, but a group of metabolic disorders and risk factors. Metabolic syndrome includes high glucose levels, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, high triglyceride levels, and obesity. If you have three or more of these symptoms, then you may be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, and are at high risk of a stroke, a heart attack, or developing diabetes.
Are Your Oversleeping?
Are you feeling sleepy or sluggish, even if you’re sleeping between 7 to 9 hours every night? You may be feeling sleepy due to a recent change in your schedule, such new work hours, or a different morning routine. You may feel excessive drowsiness if you’ve just moved, have increased your physical activity levels, or recently made changes to your sleep routine. This drowsiness should soon fade, as your body adjusts to the changes you’ve made.
If the drowsiness persists or you’re very drowsy for no apparent reason, visit your doctor or sleep specialist to find out why you’re spending so many hours asleep. Oversleeping can be bad for your health and affect your metabolism. Ask your doctor about metabolic sleep syndrome, and do a few tests to see if you have more than three of the symptoms of metabolic syndrome. At Sound Sleep Medical we’ll work together to help you get better quality sleep, naturally lower your risk of metabolic syndrome, and be less likely to oversleep.
