Sleep is important for your health!
Proper sleep helps you stay focused and alert during the day, and your body recharges at night to help you recover the day’s work. In addition, proper sleep helps fight obesity, diabetes, heart disease and premature death, to name a few.
But that does not mean you should spend hours in hours of sleep. Quality sleep is crucial for your health, but even if you sleep can be bad for you.
Excessive drowsiness can be a sign of several different medical problems, including chronic fatigue, thyroid problems, heart disease, sleep apnea, depression, narcolepsy and some medications.
It is important to enjoy sound sleep and quality, but sleeping too much can result in health risks.
Here are some of the bad things that can happen when you sleep too much.
Table of Contents
1. Leads to Obesity
There is a link between excess sleep and obesity. If you sleep for long hours, you are physically inactive for this period. Less physical activity means that your body burns fewer calories, which can lead to weight gain.
One of the studies published in Sleep provides evidence that short and long sleep times predict an increased risk of body weight and fat gain in adults. The study emphasized the need to add sleep duration to the panel of determinants that contribute to weight gain and obesity.
More than 8 hours of sleep per day is positively associated with the risk of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.
Sleeping too much was associated with psychiatric illness and a higher body mass index (BMI), but not with other chronic diseases.
2. Improve Your Risk of Diabetes
Too much sleep can affect your body’s ability to treat sugars, and impaired glucose tolerance means insulin resistance, a well-known risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
In addition, too much sleep means you are less physically active, which is important to reduce the risk of diabetes. Again, being more sedentary and obese are common risk factors for diabetes.
People who sleep too much or too little are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. The risk is 2 times higher for people who sleep less than 7 hours or more than 8 hours per night.
People who get more or less 6.5 to 7.4 hours of sleep per night are at an increased risk of high blood sugar levels.
3. Makes You Depressed
While sleep disturbance is a common symptom of depression, it has been found that sleeping too much can affect your mood and even cause depression.
Sleep affects the neurotransmitters in the brain. In addition, long sleep duration results in reduced physical activity. Increased physical activity is important to increase levels of neurotransmitters of dopamine and serotonin, which can improve your mood.
Physical activity also helps distract you from stressful stimuli and improves your self-esteem.
4. Impairs Your Brain
Sleeping too much can also affect your brain power because it engenders the brain faster. In addition, excessive sleep can be a marker of underlying circadian disturbances or health problems, which can lead to structural changes in the brain and good cognitive functioning.
In elderly women, the usual sleep duration predicts future risk for cognitive impairment, including dementia, irrespective of vascular risk factors.
5. Leads to Early Death
Sleeping too much can even lead to an earlier death. While this may sound scary, it is a fact and research has proved it.
Increased risk of dying early in short and long sleepers. Sleeping more than 8 hours per night was associated with 1.3 times greater risk of death. The review was published in Sleep.
A higher risk of mortality may be due to the fact that sleeping too much is associated with an increased risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, depression, and obesity.
Tips for enjoying quality sleep:
- Maintain a sleep schedule by going to sleep and awakening at the same time every day, even on weekends.
- Create an ideal sleep environment to help you sleep soundly.
- This can be done by sleeping in a room that is cool, dark and silent.
- Use earplugs or a white noise machine to avoid distractions.
- Do not keep a TV, computer or phone in your room.
- Do not drink coffee or alcohol too close to bedtime.
- Try meditation before bed.
- After dinner, take a short walk and then go to bed.
- If you think you sleep more, keep a sleep log.
- The morning sun exposure will help you get around and move around.
- Avoid hitting the Snooze button on your alarm.
- Make your morning routine positive and consistent.