REAL LIFE NEWS: TOO MUCH SLEEP CAN BE A BAD THING
by Hazed
Scientists have known for a long time that getting too little sleep can be very damaging to the health, but now expert say that too much sleep can be just as bad.
Feeling tired and irritable, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and heart disease are just some of the things that may happen if you persistently don’t get enough sleep.
But research carried out over the past ten years seems to show that it’s not just those who get less than six hours of sleep each night that are at risk of dying earlier. Those who sleep more than eight are also putting themselves at risk. In other words, those whose sleep patterns are outside the six-to-eight-hour band have a gradual increase in mortality.
Professor Franco Cappuccio is the professor of cardiovascular medicine and epidemiology at the University of Warwick, England. He looked through the data from 16 different studies in which a combined total of more than a million people were asked about their sleeping habits and then had their medical condition monitored over time.
He divided all the people who had been involved in the studies into three groups, depending on how long they said they slept each night: less than six hours, six to eight hours, and more than eight hours.
What he discovered was that – as expected – there was a 12% increase in the number of short sleepers that had died when they were followed up, compared to the medium sleepers. But the shocking discovery was that 30% more of the long sleepers had died. That’s a significant increase in the mortality risk. It’s roughly equivalent to the risk of drinking too much alcohol, but not as much as the risk from smoking.
Cappucio’s theory is that people who sleep more than eight hours might have an underlying healthy problem that hasn’t been identified, and that’s what kills them – not the extra sleep itself.
However, another study contradicts that. Prof Shawn Youngstedt of Arizona State University studied 14 young adults, making them spend two hours more in bed every night for three weeks. They all reported unpleasant side-effects: “increases in depressed mood” and “increases in inflammation” as well as soreness and back pain. While this was a very small study it could point to the problem with long sleep being to do with the inactivity that goes with it.
Whichever of them is right, it’s clear that enjoying an extra few hours in bed each day is likely to be bad for you.
