6 signs that you are sleeping too much
Yesterday I wrote about insomnia and the miserable effects of it on your body. Apparently, a person not only becomes grumpy from short nights but can also gain half a kilo per week due to a lack of sleep. Pff, what a misery for everyone who struggles with sleeping. Naturally, the poor sleepers (including myself) long for endless nights of catching up on sleep and long days lying stretched out in bed.
Yet this also seems not to be the most ideal solution, as there is also such a thing as too much sleep. This phenomenon feels very far away for me, but apparently, people can even suffer from hypersomnia: a sleep disorder where you need about ten to twelve hours of sleep per night. This disorder is, by the way, very rare; only two percent of the population suffers from it.
Well, by too much sleep, I mean in this case more than the average eight hours per night. Let me sketch a recognizable scenario for the long sleepers: in the morning the alarm goes off, and despite a night of about eight hours, you don't feel rested. Therefore, you turn over for a bit longer, so you can catch a few extra hours of sleep. And that's where it goes wrong, because you actually don't need those extra hours of sleep and they will only cause problems.
So what can too much sleep do to your body and how do you know if you are suffering from it? I will tell you below, perhaps this is a meager consolation for the short sleepers whom I didn't exactly make happy with my article yesterday.
1. You gain weight without a clear reason
Unfortunately, too much sleep can also cause you to gain weight, without it being accompanied by unhealthy eating or less exercise. It is not yet precisely clear why you get fatter from too much sleep, but it could be related to your metabolism, which works slower.
2. You suffer from headaches
Long nights can lead to headaches. According to Dr. Elizabeth McDevitt, a researcher at the University of California, fluctuations in your nerve impulses during sleep can trigger a headache attack. Additionally, sleeping in can also lead to headaches because you are sleeping at a time when you would normally be having breakfast or enjoying your coffee. This can lead to dehydration and/or a lack of caffeine, which causes pounding headaches.
3. You experience unexplained depressive feelings
Research shows that lying in bed too long can lead to depressive feelings. Somewhere I can imagine this, because when I have lounged in bed all day, I always feel a bit gloomy and sad at the end of the day.
4. You have pain everywhere
It sounds very tempting to stay in bed all day, but as soon as you feel pain all over your body after such a long sleep session, you know that you have indeed been lying down too long. A feeling of stiffness while you haven't exercised? Then you have probably been napping too long.
5. You are not present mentally
We all probably recognize this feeling after a long night, where we think we can catch up on sleep. Yet we wake up super groggy and are not mentally present all day, making it feel as if we are still in dreamland. It also seems that people who sleep an average of more than nine hours for six years show reduced brain function compared to the eight-hour sleepers. So we can say that too long a sleep is not good for your brain.
6. You are always tired
Last but not least: too much sleep actually makes you dead tired. So are you wondering why you are always tired despite your long nights of sleep? Now you know why. Even catching up after a short night has little positive effect because it messes up your biological clock. You guessed it: that makes you tired.
