Oversleeping

One thing a lot of people know now is how not getting enough sleep is bad for you. It can cause fatigue, trouble concentrating, and a bunch of other health problems. But has anyone thought that getting too much sleep is also bad for your health? I have done some research and I believe I have analyzed enough studies to make a conclusion if oversleeping is a real issue, and what the affects of it are.

oversleeping-620x330

First thing, we should define how much sleep is too much sleep. The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults should get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep a day. For teenagers, there was a pulmonary medicine study that concludes that they need 9-9.5 hours of sleep a day. When I did my research, almost all of the studies compared to people who slept between 7-9 hours of sleep to people who slept 9-11 hours a day. With all of the studies using the 9 hour as the cut off time between enough sleep and too much sleep, I can conclude that over 9 hours of sleep a day is considered oversleeping. But how do people get to the point where they oversleep on a regular basis? I did some research and discovered a few reasons why people oversleep.

The National institute of Alcohol Abuse and alcoholism states that the abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs can cause people to sleep for an excessive amount of time. Another reason people could oversleep is depression. Most people who suffer from depression have insomnia, but %15 of people with depression oversleep because instead of getting out of bed, depressed people are not motivated enough, so they stay in bed and keep sleeping. Fatigue and sleep Apnea can also affect your sleeping cycle, which could make you oversleep in the end. Now that we know why people oversleep, lets see the side effects of oversleeping.

Obesity

WebMd had one study that showed how people who slept for 9-10 hours every night were %21 more likely to become obese over a six year period than to the people who slept from 7-8 hours every night. American Scientists conducted a study that found a correlation between diabetes and oversleeping. People who slept for more than 9 hours a night were more likely to become obese. Scientists believe this is true because when you sleep more you are doing less physical activity, so you are burning less energy, and that left over energy that isn’t used is stored as fat, which can lead to obesity and diabetes. Also, researchers from the University of Laval in Canada studied 276 people’s sleeping habits. They concluded that %20 of the people who slept over 8 hours developed diabetes, which was compared to only a %7 of diabetes patients from people who slept 7-8 hours of sleep a night.

Sleep-Apnea

Heart Disease

There was a Nurses Health study that had 72,000 women participate in it. The study observed these women and categorized them by the women who sleep 9-11 hours and the women who sleep under 9 hours. They concluded that the women who slept 9-11 hours were %38 more likely to have coronary heart disease. The same study was also observed on the Health Guidance website. There was also research that was presented on the Huffington Post from the Chicago Medical school at an American college of cardiology meeting in 2012. They stated that sleeping for 8 or more hours a night was linked to increased heart issues like stroke, heart failure, and heart attacks.

Other possible medical affects

A lot of the research I found also mentioned back pains with oversleeping, but there was a problem with connecting oversleeping to back pains, because there could have been a number of other reason why people would have back pains.

Another possible consequence of oversleeping would be to feel more tired than usual. This may not make a lot of sense, because you would think that if you got so much sleep you would never feel tired when you were awake. But scientists do state that sleeping too much can throw off your biological clock, which can trick your body and then your body would give you mixed signals, like making you think you’re tired when you really aren’t. Oversleeping can also make you more prone to getting sick because by not being active and awake, your immune system rests too much, then is too weak to take care of your body when you have a full day of activities. This theory can also suffer from causation not equaling correlation, but there are many studies that are being done in it.

images

Conclusion

After my research, I think I can conclude a few things. First, the healthy amount of hours to sleep per day is 7-9 hours. 9-11 will not immediately kill you, but from the studies there are definitely some differences with over-sleepers. Another thing I can conclude is that oversleeping can cause obesity. From the few different studies that I analyzed and discusses in the blog, I think that oversleeping is very likely to be connected to diabetes and obesity. Heart disease also seems to be another side effect of oversleeping. Some of the studies were only done on women, so I would like to see studies done on both genders to completely conclude that oversleeping will lead to heart problems, but I think it is on the right track. I can not conclude that back pain can come from oversleeping, because there were little to no studies done on it. I also can not conclude that oversleeping causes your immune system to become weaker, because there are no final studies done on this, but I personally believe that there is something there that should be tested. If you believe you are just generally feeling less healthy, maybe try and balance your sleep schedule. Try and sleep for about 8-9 hours max every night, and see if you feel any better. If you have any thoughts or ideas about this, please comment below!

4 thoughts on “Oversleeping

  1. Aubree Sylvia Rader

    You are making a big claim in your blog, that oversleeping can cause severe health effects in the future which may even lead to one’s death, but I think it is important that you address chance, Texas sharp shooter problem, or confounding variables as a possibility of effecting the results to the studies you found. Children need more sleep than adults to grow and develop, but what about other body types? Do larger men that have physically demanding jobs everyday need more sleep than the average person and what about elders? You could also look into whether or not someone should catch up on sleep following a night that they got little sleep. You could have concluded by evaluating whether more or less sleep is more harmful to one’s body.

  2. Allison C Lightner

    I’ve never really thought about oversleeping having such intense health effects, but some of it does make sense. Like because you are inactive you are more prone to becoming obese or getting sick more often because your immune system is weakened. Why is the 7-9 hours the magic number for sleep? Also, can you go into a little more detail about why you would coronary heart disease or the other health problems? I didn’t really find that much information in your argument, you seemed to just skim over and state the health problems. So why is it that children need much more sleep and they don’t seem to have health problems? Is it because they aren’t fully developed? I think it would be interesting to conduct a study and analyze the different age groups, sleep and the effects. Overall, really interesting blog.

  3. Caroline Schablin Mcfadden

    This is a well written blog, but I am questioning your word choice. You claimed in your conclusion that “oversleeping can cause obesity,” remember that correlation does not equal causation. You did reference a few sources in your blog but only WebMd in regards to obesity. I am curious if this could be reverse causation at work here, it seems very plausible that obesity caused individuals to oversleep. Although I do believe that there are negative side effects to oversleeping, like the extreme tiredness the next day, I have trouble believing the causation from the information provided.

  4. Cassidy Paige Heiserman

    This post was very well written and organized! While I do not sleep over 9 hours each night, I notice that when I do (particularly on weekends) I am even MORE tired than I would have been had I woken up earlier. Lazy days in which I barely do anything besides lay around and binge watch Netflix seem to be more tiring than the days I am constantly on the go, but why? Though it is not the main topic of your blog, I thought that this was an interesting spin to take. While the data on Huffington Post may be biased, they posted a very interesting article regarding over sleeping http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-j-breus/how-come-i-feel-more-tire_b_428928.html The article compares sleeping later to jet lag, and explains that our bodies follow a regular pattern. When we sleep for a longer period of time, that pattern is thrown off. Therefore, our internal body clocks differ from the real clocks, which throws us off and causes fatigue and confusion.
    Overall, very interesting post and I enjoyed reading it!

Comments are closed.