5 More Minutes

Sleeping is something that we as humans love to do. Many people even spend most of their lives just staying in bed and sleeping since it is what they believe is for the best. These views towards sleep are common among people, but it is actually the opposite that is true.

People mistake a goodnight’s rest with getting too much sleep for the night. It is true that getting a goodnight’s rest leaves you with energy and mentally prepared for the next day, but when crossing that line between enough sleep and too much, it turns from “I’m ready to begin my day!” to “I don’t want to get out of bed today.” In the article, “Oversleeping”, by Austin Meadows (Sleep Foundation), he states, 

“In addition to sleeping more than nine hours a night, other symptoms of oversleeping include: Excessive napping during the day, Excessive daytime sleepiness, Headache”

Headaches throughout the day doesn’t sound like somebody who is mentally prepared to finish what they had planned for the day ahead of them. Meadows speaks up about headaches due to oversleeping from a research that would include patients wearing watch-type electronic diaries as a form of way for scientists to detect any headaches from sleeping too little and too much. After also looking into this research done by Hiroe Kikuchi, Kazuhiro Yoshiuchi, Yoshiharu Yamamoto, Gen Komaki, and Akira Akabayashi, we see that the results that they have come up with is that, “Objectively measured total sleep time was significantly positively associated with momentary headache intensity on the following day.” Contradicting the idea that getting that extra amount of sleep in will do better for you, I doubt anybody would want to be left with this effect. 

The idea that getting more sleep the following day or napping throughout the day after a night of barely sleeping is another false idea that people tend to have thought highly of. Sleep debt is the effect of not getting your usual amount of sleep for the current night. There is this thought that it would make up for the lack of sleep that people have gotten the night before, but in fact, it leads to the opposite of what people would want to believe the effects are. 

Meadows goes into detail about this, explaining that it is actually what causes people to get more sleep than they are supposed to get. Who would’ve thought that not getting enough sleep would eventually lead to oversleeping? This idea of trying to make up for a sleep debt eventually gets to the point where now we have to deal with mental problems such as depression and anxiety. Health conditions would also continue to play apart in this by adding towards sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea. Trying to make up for the loss of sleep would just lead us down a worse path than what we were already on. 

All of these holes in the argument that more sleep is good for you just doesn’t make any sense at all when it goes back to the argument contradicting itself when evidence shows that it leads to more of these mental problems more than anything. 

Writer Allison Aubrey is a main supporter of how getting 10+ hours of sleep will do you more good than bad. She explains in her article, “Want To Get Faster, Smarter? Sleep 10 Hours.” Aubrey explains in this article how sleeping for an extended period of time had helped football players have increased performance during their workouts and would even have a faster 40-yard dash. In Aubrey’s article, she states, 

“It’s hard to say how the connection between more sleep and improved physical performance may translate to weekend warriors — or middle-age folks who are just trying to hold onto a nine-minute jogging pace.The take-home message here, Church says, is that this is just one more example of how sleep makes a difference.”

Sleeping does make a difference, but not in the way of how Aubrey thinks it does. This short term run of how sleeping more has improved these football players is nothing more than a short term run. Aubrey is more than incorrect in this research as she doesn’t realize that it is going to affect the players’ health in more bad ways than good ways. The risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases, and even anxiety are the bad ways in how it could go south for these football players if they are to be kept on this disastrous sleeping schedule. 

Saying one thing while research says another is one thing to do, but then not having enough evidence at the same time just makes your argument completely fall apart. In Aubrey’s article, we don’t see much evidence or research that could actually explain why this increased amount of sleep should be continued by more people. We go on this extensive, useless, journey of reading about how she just continues to say that increased sleep helps but we don’t get the evidence needed to go off of our own thinking. It doesn’t help when we are just looking at her saying “well this equals this so it has to be right”, when there are possibly many different other factors that could have led to the conclusion of football players playing better. What kind of argument is it if they are just saying this and that without anything to back it up?

As much as people would like to believe that staying in bed longer would eventually lead to positive effects on your body and mind, There just isn’t enough evidence as to why it would do any good for anybody. It might feel like a good thing when waking up at 1 in the afternoon after sleeping for 12 hours, but when you take into account the negative effects of chronic diseases and the mental issues it could lead to, it just isn’t worth it in the end. 

So just think about that the next time you want to stay in bed for just “5 more minutes.” 

References

Aubrey, Allison. “Want To Get Faster, Smarter? Sleep 10 Hours.” NPR, 7 June 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/06/07/127478147/want-to-get-faster-smarter-sleep-10-hours. Accessed 22 November 2022.

Meadows, Austin. “Causes and Effects of Oversleeping.” Sleep Foundation, 15 March 2022, https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/oversleeping. Accessed 22 November 2022.

Parker, Hilary. “Oversleeping Side Effects: Is Too Much Sleep Harmful?” WebMD, 15 January 2022, https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/physical-side-effects-oversleeping. Accessed 22 November 2022.

Premier Health. “Too Much Sleep Can be Bad for Your Health.” Premier Health, 2021, https://www.premierhealth.com/your-health/articles/women-wisdom-wellness-/too-much-sleep-can-be-bad-for-your-health. Accessed 22 November 2022.