Many of us, myself included, use the weekends to pay off the sleep debt we accrued during the work week. However, excessive sleeping can often leave us feeling more fatigued. A piece published today on Wired Science examines this phenomenon and discusses why clocking extra hours of shut-eye doesn't necessarily benefit our health. Nick Stockton writes:
Oversleeping feels so much like a hangover that scientists call it sleep drunkenness. But, unlike the brute force neurological damage caused by alcohol, your misguided attempt to stock up on rest makes you feel sluggish by confusing the part of your brain that controls your body’s daily cycle.
Your internal rhythms are set by your circadian pacemaker, a group of cells clustered in the hypothalamus, a primitive little part of the brain that also controls hunger, thirst, and sweat. Primarily triggered by light signals from your eye, the pacemaker figures out when it’s morning and sends out chemical messages keeping the rest of the cells in your body on the same clock.
Scientists believe that the pacemaker evolved to tell the cells in our bodies how to regulate their energy on a daily basis. When you sleep too much, you’re throwing off that biological clock, and it starts telling the cells a different story than what they’re actually experiencing, inducing a sense of fatigue. You might be crawling out of bed at 11am, but your cells started using their energy cycle at seven. This is similar to how jet lag works.
The article goes on to explain that past research has shown that, "If you’re oversleeping on the regular, you could be putting yourself at risk for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity."
Previously: The high price of interrupted sleep on your health, Examining how sleep quality and duration affect cognitive function as we age, What are the consequences of sleep deprivation? and BBC study: Oh, what a difference an hour of sleep makes
Photo by Stephen Poff