Why Oversleeping Is Risky. “While consistently getting less than the recommended amount of sleep has been associated with multiple adverse health outcomes, sleeping more than nine hours per night regularly may also be detrimental,” Makekau says. She says oversleeping can lead to: Increased fatigue and low energy.
Sleep needs can vary from person to person, but in general, experts recommend that healthy adults get an average of 7 to 9 hours per night of shuteye. If you regularly need more than 8 or 9 hours of sleep per night to feel rested, it might be a sign of an underlying problem, Polotsky says.
Idiopathic Hypersomnia
This sleep disorder is characterized by difficulty waking. View Source , excessive sleepiness, and the inability to feel rested after sleeping at night or napping during the day. With this disorder, you may sleep as much as 14 to 18 hours a day.
You may feel sleepy after a full night's sleep due to a medical condition. Medical conditions that can make you tired, or make it hard to meet your sleep need, include: Sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and restless leg syndrome. Iron deficiency anemia.
It's true a good night's sleep is essential for health. But oversleeping has been linked to a host of medical problems, including diabetes, heart disease, and increased risk of death.
And while the occasional long sleep is generally nothing to worry about, oversleeping several days a week could be a sign that something more serious is going on.
In medical terms, oversleeping means sleeping more than nine hours in 24 hours. It's associated with a higher risk of several conditions, including heart disease, stroke, and heart failure. That doesn't mean it causes those conditions. Instead, oversleeping may be a symptom of other underlying conditions.
Excessive Sleeping Warning Signs
Low energy during the day. Symptoms of anxiety. Memory issues. Extreme sleepiness unresolved by napping.
Chronic medical conditions and mental health disorders are often accompanied by daytime sleepiness. Common culprits include depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, lupus, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer, chronic pain, obesity. View Source , and hypothyroidism, among others.
Hypersomnia can also include situations in which a person needs to sleep a lot. This may be due to other medical conditions, but can also be due to a problem in the brain. Causes of this problem include: Medical conditions, such as fibromyalgia and low thyroid function.
Research bears out the connection between too much sleep and too little energy. It appears that any significant deviation from normal sleep patterns can upset the body's rhythms and increase daytime fatigue.
The symptoms often develop slowly during the teens or young adulthood. Hypersomnia is usually indicated by long sleep periods and excessive sleepiness or excessively deep sleep. It may be associated with difficulty in awakening – the person may feel confused or disoriented (sleep drunkenness).
While sleeping in for a morning or two may help ease symptoms like fatigue or daytime sleepiness, this is often not enough to adequately recover from sleep debt. Research has shown that it can take up to four days to recover from one hour of lost sleep and up to nine days to completely eliminate sleep debt.
The Sleep Foundation defines oversleeping as sleeping more than nine hours in a 24-hour period. You've likely done that before when recovering from a stressful work week or a busy travel weekend or if your body was fighting a cold.
Language switcher. Experts recommend that adults sleep between 7 and 9 hours a night. Adults who sleep less than 7 hours a night may have more health issues than those who sleep 7 or more hours a night.
Common underlying issues that can make you feel tired after waking up and persist throughout your day include sleep inertia, sleep disorders, bright light exposure, and a poor bedroom environment, to name a few.
"Simply put, hair is at its most vulnerable when wet. Sleeping with wet hair can lead to a host of problems for the scalp: unwanted bacteria, fungal infections, skin irritation, itchiness, dryness, redness, and dandruff," says hairstylist Miko Branch, co-founder of hair care brand Miss Jessie's.
It's common to associate sleep disorders with getting too little sleep, yet sleep apnea and narcolepsy can actually cause hypersomnia or excessive tiredness. Hypersomnia poses serious health risks and is linked to several medical problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and death.
Vitamin B12 Deficiency: A Rare Cause of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness - PMC.
Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that makes people very drowsy during the day. People with narcolepsy find it hard to stay awake for long periods of time. They fall asleep suddenly. This can cause serious problems in their daily routine.
Staying awake all night and sleeping all day for just a few days can disrupt levels and time of day patterns of more than 100 proteins in the blood, including those that influence blood sugar, energy metabolism, and immune function, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research published in the journal PNAS ...