Today I slept a long time. Over 11 hours. I awoke to feel well-rested and refreshed.
The question on my mind is this – is such long sleeping healthy?
This is what the Internet had to say.
What do the websites say?
Most sites agree that the average necessary sleep for an adult is between seven and nine hours. That seems to tally with what I know about the sleep times of friends and family. Also, I often sleep inside this bracket.
Many of the results can be summarized as “you are sick, there is no cure, this will probably kill you in many nasty ways.” Words like hypersomnia are thrown around liberally. While hypersomnia may be a real thing, I do not fit the descriptor of suffering from a near-constant need for sleep.
I find this largely unsatisfying for a few reasons:
- Rarity of cited sources
- It looks like the sites are copying each other
- The experts and sources found did not agree with this
According to the American Sleep Association, long sleeping is unrefreshing. My experience does not reflect that. As I said at the start, today I feel deeply refreshed and healthy.
Long sleeping is an uncommon sleep finding or disorder characterized by the body’s inclination to remain asleep for longer periods of time than would otherwise be deemed typical. This often results in 10 to 12 hours of sleep each night for people with the disorder. Less than that leaves them feeling unrefreshed and sleepy throughout the day.
Long Sleep, American Sleep Association
What do the experts say?
Hopkins Medicine does not agree. They cite professor Vsevolod Polotsky who suggests that the symptoms associated with long sleep may cause long sleep rather than be caused by it.
Does that mean sleeping too much will make you sick? Not necessarily, says Vsevolod Polotsky, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “We don’t exactly know the cause and effect,” he says. “It probably works the other way, that when you are sick, it leads to more sleep time.”
Oversleeping: Bad for Your Health? Hopkins Medicine.
A paper (Who Are the Long Sleepers? Towards an Understanding of the Mortality Relationship by Michael A. Grandner and Sean P. A. Drummond [also found here]) summarises findings on long sleep. The abstract takes the time to point out that “relatively little is known about risks associated with excessive sleep”. In other words, the sites saying long sleep is definitively bad may be scaremongering for no good reason.
Grandner and Drummond go on to say, “While the available scientific literature is currently unable to provide a definitive answer to this question, and the available studies have limitations, we will summarize and describe the numerous studies demonstrating increased mortality risk associated with long sleep […]”
In other words, the experts are yet to reach a conclusion. While there is a link, the direction of that link is unclear. Does long sleep cause ill-health or does ill-health cause long sleep?
What do the sites link with long sleeping?
The sites I looked at all liked to link long sleeping with:
- Type 2 diabetes
- Obesity
- Headaches
- Back Pain
- Depression
- Death
With the exception of death (obviously), I have or have had most of these long before I found myself regularly sleeping for long stretches. For me, this lends credence to the words of professor Vsevolod Polotsky who suggests these are not the effects of long sleep but the causes. In other words, these other sites may have found a correlation but got the cause and effect reversed. Or, at least, whoever they are all copying did so.
Is long sleep even a problem?
Is long sleep a problem? Not necessarily if you ask WebMD.
Of course, not everyone who oversleeps has a sleep disorder. Other possible causes of oversleeping include the use of certain substances, such as alcohol and some prescription medications. Other medical conditions, including depression, can cause people to oversleep. And then there are people who simply want to sleep a lot.
Hilary Parker, Physical Side Effects of Oversleeping, WebMD
My long sleep could be due to my medications. It could be for a bunch of other reasons, or it could just be because I need extra sleep sometimes.
Alarmingly, long sleep and a greater risk of death do seem to be strongly linked. Grandner and Drummond’s paper goes to great length to point out that almost all studies found a link between higher rates of death and long sleep.
Conclusion
As the Internet is a terrible doctor and should not be consulted for symptom diagnosis, I will wait until I have had a chance to speak to my GP about my long sleep. At which point I will report back.
