Doctors recommend anywhere between seven and nine hours of sleep a night for the average adult. Sometimes, though, you’d rather roll back over than roll out of bed. Here are some hints that you may be giving the snooze button too much of a workout.
Low Energy
Oddly enough, one of the main symptoms of sleeping too much is feeling like you haven’t gotten enough sleep at all. A tendency to have little to no energy throughout the day along with a habit of napping on a regular basis is a sure sign that you’re actually sleeping too much. This is due to the fact that your body operates on something akin to a biological clock. Your clock is controlled by something called a circadian pacemaker, which is a bunch of cells that regulate your body and tell it when it’s day and when it’s night. If you sleep too long into the day, it disrupts your clock and causes your entire body to get out of whack.
Depression
People who sleep the day away often end up feeling like they, well, slept the day away. While once or twice might not matter too much, a habit of this leads you to feeling lazy and as if you’re wasting your life. Not too surprisingly, oversleeping and this feeling of wastefulness have been shown to lead to depression. An estimated fifteen percent of people that suffer from depression also sleep over nine overs a day on average.
Memory Problems
Sleep is the period where both your body and your brain recharge, so stifling the body’s ability to regroup can have some negative effects. One of these is a loss of memory. That’s because people who sleep more than nine hours a night tend to have poor sleep quality. By tossing and turning for long periods of time, it becomes difficult for your brain to transform short-term memory into long.
Headaches
One of the most common and unpleasant side effects that people who oversleep experience is a headache. Do you have a habit of developing headaches throughout the day, or early in the morning, in particular? This is caused by the effect that oversleeping has on the neurotransmitters of the brain. It’s because oversleeping can mess with the levels of serotonin produced in the brain, causing headaches and migraines.
Weight Gain
Have you found yourself packing on a few extra pounds lately? This might seem obvious, but the body burns far more calories while awake and moving than while it’s asleep. With less time to burn off energy, all of those calories and carbs are being stored as fat. Of course, this begins leading to other medical issues if not addressed.
Back Pain
Getting too much sleep can lead to back pain. Lying in a bed for hours on end, particularly on a mediocre or cheap mattress, can actually lead to a myriad of back issues. If you have pain in your lower back it’s actually advisable to be as active as possible, so it can be doubly bad for you to lie in bed all day. This one can be circumvented somewhat with an expensive, specialized mattress.
