An Overview of Oversleeping: Is Too Much Sleep Bad For You?

It is a common misconception that everyone needs eight hours of quality sleep every night to function properly. The optimal amount of sleep actually varies from person to person, with most adults needing anywhere between seven to nine hours. Anything significantly less than this could be deemed undersleeping, which is well-known to negatively impact brain function, including memory, attention, and emotional regulation, and has even been linked to other chronic health problems. 

Not so broadly recognized is that oversleeping can also impact your health and well-being. Too much of a good thing, as it were. While occasionally oversleeping after a night out or a busy day can happen, and may leave a person feeling tired or groggy the next day, continuous oversleeping can be a sign of something more sinister. Healthcare professionals, such as general practitioners and nurses qualified through online ABSN programs, will tell you there are several links between oversleeping and other medical issues, including heart disease, diabetes, and an increased risk of death. 

Read on to learn more about what oversleeping is, complications that may arise from it, the causes of oversleeping, and ways to help prevent it. 

What is oversleeping?

The amount of sleep needed is highly dependent on a person’s daytime habits, activities, overall health, and sleeping patterns. Sometimes, after strenuous days, an illness, or the night after a person experiences less sleep than normal, an extra hour or two may be required to help a person feel their best. This is sometimes referred to as sleep debt, or making up for lost sleep, and is not generally considered oversleeping. 

If, however, you are regularly getting much more sleep than your body needs, or consistently find yourself needing more than nine hours of sleep per night in an attempt to feel rested, it may be a sign of an underlying sleep or medical problem. 

Hypersomnia is a condition where you experience excessive sleepiness during the day while also oversleeping at night, and is commonly caused by a range of sleeping disorders, medical conditions, or the use of certain substances and medications. To get a diagnosis of oversleeping, a doctor will perform a physical and medical history examination to determine your lifestyle and dietary habits, review your current medications, and assess your sleeping habits. A doctor may also order tests to make a proper diagnosis, including a polysomnography, sleep latency tests, a home sleep test for sleep apnea, and other take-home tests to document your daytime sleepiness levels. 

Complications from oversleeping

Short-term complications from oversleeping go beyond simple tiredness. It can also include:

• Excessive napping during the day

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• Excessive daytime sleepiness

• Not ‘feeling awake’ after waking up

• Headaches

• Agitation and irritation

• Anxiety

• Decreased appetite

• Brain ‘fogginess’

• Memory problems

  
  

If you are experiencing chronic oversleeping issues, or if the underlying cause is more serious, complications may include:

• Obesity

• Cardiovascular disease

• Increased risk of stroke

• Coronary heart disease

• Diabetes

  
  

It is incredibly important to work with your healthcare professional if you believe you are regularly oversleeping to gain a proper diagnosis and develop an appropriate treatment plan. 

What causes oversleeping, and how can it be treated?

Oversleeping can have many causes, many of which may require different treatment methods. While some issues may be resolved through natural remedies and simple lifestyle changes such as keeping a consistent sleep schedule, exercising regularly, not using electronic devices before sleeping, and avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and food before bed, and even placing your alarm more than an arm’s reach away, other conditions may require greater interventions in the form of medication, the main of which is Provigil (modafinil) - a wake-promoting drug. 

Disrupted sleep cycle

Sleep cycles are important to help a person feel rested after sleeping. Interruptions to these cycles can lead to sleepiness, which in turn can lead to oversleeping. Interruptions may come in the form of loud noises, bright lights, caffeine consumption, pain, or teeth grinding, as well as from the impact of sleep disorders. 

Avoiding these triggers, or addressing pain or teeth grinding, can help resolve disruptions to your sleep cycle. 

Obstructive sleep apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea is a sleep disorder that causes a person to stop breathing repeatedly during the night due to a blockage in the upper airway. This can cause pauses in breathing, reduced blood oxygen levels, and brief awakenings, all of which disrupt a person's sleep cycle. 

Sleep apnea can be resolved with appropriate treatment. This often involves the use of a CPAP machine, which helps support your breathing during sleep. 

Nacrolepsy

Narcolepsy is a sleep condition where the brain cannot control your ability to sleep or stay awake. People with narcolepsy will often fall asleep during the day and find the urge nearly impossible to resist. Alongside excessive sleepiness, narcolepsy can also leave people with sudden muscle weakness, sleep-related hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.

Narcolepsy is not curable, but it is treatable and generally responds quite well to medication and changes to daily routine and lifestyle. 

Depression

People with depression and anxiety often also struggle with sleep disorders. Although depression and oversleeping are closely linked, the direction of the two is not always clear. Most existing evidence, however, tends to indicate that oversleeping is a symptom, not a cause, of depression. 

There are many treatments for both depression and anxiety, including cognitive behavioral therapy and prescription medications, that can work to help improve symptoms, including oversleeping. 

Medications

A side effect of some medications can be excessive sleepiness, which can lead to oversleeping. Some of these medications may include sedatives, cannabis, psychotropic drugs, hypertension drugs, or antidepressants.

If a person’s medication is impacting their sleep, they should talk to their doctor about adjusting the dosage or switching to a new medication as soon as possible.