Mo’ Sleeping Mo’ Problems

Oversleeping continues to rob people of their fullest lives. Anxiety, depression, and chronic diseases are all main causes of what oversleeping leads to. People who don’t realize this or don’t monitor the amount of sleep they are getting a night, will lead themselves into a spiral of such problems mentioned. People who oversleep are generally people who work odd hours, have an uncomfortable sleep situation, or a sleeping disorder. 

Sleeping is one of the most necessary things for people to function properly throughout their day. When people begin to get too much of it, they start to cross this line where it can start out as one of the best things for you, to one of the worst things for you. Studies have shown that sleeping over eight hours a night can reduce cognitive ability and reasoning skills, increase anxiety and depression, and improves the possibility of chronic diseases. 

Oversleeping can have detrimental effects that reduce cognitive ability and reasoning skills. In a recent study at the University of Western Ontario, the amount of sleep associated with highly functional cognitive behavior was the same for everyone (seven to eight hours) regardless of the age. 

Reasoning and verbal abilities were two actions strongly affected by sleep. Crossing that line of getting too much sleep will leave people’s body and mind to be mentally drained. Continuing to oversleep makes it laborious to get out of that consistent sluggish feeling everyday. These people end up living their daily lives by going into a state called “sleep drunkenness” that is described in an article named What’s Up With That? Why Does Sleeping In Just Make Me More Tired? By Nick Stockton where Stockton states,

 “Many scientists call oversleeping sleep drunkenness because it can feel like a hangover. But, unlike the brute force neurological damage caused by alcohol, your misguided attempts to stock up on rest makes you feel sluggish by confusing the part of your brain that controls your body’s daily cycle.”

Chronic diseases are another one of the treacherous effects that can be caused by oversleeping. If people are oversleeping consistently, they are putting themselves at risk for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Harvard’s massive Nurses Health Study found that people who slept 9 to11 hours a night developed memory problems and were more likely to develop heart disease than people who slept a solid eight hours. Sleeping too much will also cause people to gain weight. A recent study showed that people who slept for nine to ten hours every night were 21% more likely to become obese over a six-year period than were people who slept between seven and eight hours. While a six-year period might not sound like something crazy to look out for, the process of trying to get away from these effects are more grueling than people might believe. 

Anxiety and depression, chronic diseases, reasoning and verbal abilities, and reduced cognitive abilities are all results that come from the menacing problem of oversleeping. Despite being threatening effects, they are only considered long-term effects, which means that it will only happen to us if we consistently oversleep for years. Oversleeping comes with short term effects as well, despite already having the many long-term effects mentioned before. 

Despite oversleeping every once in a while being irrelevant to the damages of oversleeping, short-term effects are the start of the aggravating causes of oversleeping when we begin to oversleep daily. We begin with short-term effects that range from tiredness, laziness, dizziness, loss of memory, and allow our body to get used to this bad habit which would lead to the long-term effects. In Oversleeping: The Effects & Health Risks of Sleeping Too Much, Michelle Roberge states, 

“ ‘If someone is sleeping too much, more than 9 hours each night, the quality of sleep should be evaluated. If the quality of your sleep is poor, it could result in more time in bed.  Your body needs deep restorative sleep, and if that is not happening during the recommended 8 hours, your body will instinctively try to prolong the sleep period to obtain the quality of sleep it needs,’ says Michele Roberge”

Once our bodies reach the point where we get used to oversleeping and do it consistently, that is when the abhorrent effects begin to weigh down on us and take tolls on our health. We begin with the disturbing feelings of being tired and lazy. These effects cost us our happiness and we lose the opportunity to have that productive day that we planned on having the day before, that is if we even remember. 

Memory loss adds on to the pile of irritating short-term causes of oversleeping. We begin to not remember things clearly and start to live our lives unproductively when we oversleep daily. We forget what we study the night before a big test, we forget things that we planned to do on certain days, and could even get to the point where we don’t remember our mother’s birthday while it has already passed (which could be possibly the worst one). In the article, Getting 9 Hours of Sleep Per Night May Indicate Risk of Dementia, Christopher Curly states, 

“Could regularly ‘sleeping in’ be a harbinger of cognitive decline, including Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia? A new study from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida suggests it might. Sleeping more than 9 hours per night was linked to a decrease in memory and episodic learning, both risk factors of dementia.” 

There is a difference between somebody who always had a long duration of sleep vs. somebody who is just trying to play catchup with their sleep, despite the fact that both are considered oversleeping. This is also when the short-term effects and long-term effects start to draw a line between each other and begin to differentiate. The people who are just simply playing catchup have a higher risk of catching these short-term effects while the people that continue to sleep in have a higher risk of the long-term effects.  

Oversleeping is the reason why so many people continue to face adversities in their lives. People don’t understand the calamitous short-term and long-term effects  that oversleeping leads to. Until they do, they will continue to live afflictive lives.

References

Curley, C., Krans, B., & Hammond, N. (2019, October 14). 9 Hours of Sleep Per Night Linked to Dementia Risk. Healthline. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.healthline.com/health-news/9-hours-of-sleep-per-night-dementia-risk

Parker, H. (2022, January 15). Oversleeping Side Effects: Is Too Much Sleep Harmful? WebMD. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/physical-side-effects-oversleeping

Roberge, M., & Osmun, R. (2022, November 13). Oversleeping: The Effects & Health Risks of Sleeping Too Much. Amerisleep. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://amerisleep.com/blog/oversleeping-the-health-effects/

Stockton, N. (2014, July 22). What’s Up With That: Why Does Sleeping In Just Make Me More Tired? WIRED. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.wired.com/2014/07/whats-up-with-that-why-does-sleeping-in-just-make-me-more-tired/

University of Western Ohio. (2018, October 9). Too Much Sleep is Bad For the Brain. Neuroscience News. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://neurosciencenews.com/too-much-sleep-brain-9983/