“Long sleepers” are people who regularly sleep more than the average person their age. As adults, their nightly length of sleep tends to be 10 to 12 hours. This sleep is very normal and of a good quality. It is simply much longer than most people because of their natural biological clock.
“While consistently getting less than the recommended amount of sleep has been associated with multiple adverse health outcomes, sleeping more than nine hours per night regularly may also be detrimental,” Makekau says. She says oversleeping can lead to: Increased fatigue and low energy. Decrease in immune function.
Maybe you're fighting off a cold, recovering from jet lag, or getting some rest after a particularly stressful time at work or home. More persistent oversleeping could be a sign of a sleep disorder or that something's not quite right with your metabolic health.
And while the occasional long sleep is generally nothing to worry about, oversleeping several days a week could be a sign that something more serious is going on.
How Much Sleep Is Too Much? Sleep needs can vary from person to person, but in general, experts recommend that healthy adults get an average of 7 to 9 hours per night of shuteye. If you regularly need more than 8 or 9 hours of sleep per night to feel rested, it might be a sign of an underlying problem, Polotsky says.
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.
Hypersomnia is excessive sleepiness. There are many causes of excessive sleepiness, including insufficient or inadequate sleep, sleep disorders, medications and medical or psychiatric illnesses. The characteristics of hypersomnia vary from one person to the next depending on age, lifestyle and underlying causes.
The longest recorded time a person has slept is 11 days, set by Randy Gardner in 1964. Gardner was a high school student at the time, and he stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days and 24 minutes) as part of a science fair experiment.
Obesity. Sleeping too much or too little could make you weigh too much, as well. One recent study showed that people who slept for nine or 10 hours every night were 21% more likely to become obese over a six-year period than were people who slept between seven and eight hours.
Too much sleep, however, can be a way of escaping your feelings or situations in life. Recovery is an exhausting process and can be uncomfortable and challenging at times. It is easy to want to escape to peaceful sleep, but sleep is not a healthy escape if it interferes with your daily life.
Staying awake all night and sleeping all day for just a few days can disrupt levels and time of day patterns of more than 100 proteins in the blood, including those that influence blood sugar, energy metabolism, and immune function, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research published in the journal PNAS ...
If you or a loved one feel sleepy or fatigued, despite having 7-8 hours of sleep, it could indicate poor sleep quality or be a sign of an underlying sleep disorder. If you have questions or concerns about your sleep health, please speak with your primary care provider.
Editor's note: Kleine-Levin Syndrome mostly affects teen boys, causing them to sleep up to 20 hours a day during episodes that can last weeks. It's rare, possibly affecting one person in a million, with a higher incidence among Jewish people.
You may be drowsy in the day if you have insomnia (trouble falling or staying asleep) or another condition that keeps you from getting enough rest at night, such as chronic pain, depression, anxiety, an overactive bladder, restless legs syndrome, or sleep apnea (frequent pauses in breathing during sleep).
Possible underlying reasons include depression and anxiety. Depression is linked to dysania, a nonmedical term for when a person feels the need to stay in bed without sleeping. A wide range of physical conditions can also lead to fatigue, making it hard to get up. They include ME/CFS and long COVID.
Still, for some, the background noise can be relaxing or sleep-inducing, Vikas Jain, MD, a clinical assistant professor of sleep medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, told Health. The comfort and familiarity of your favorite movie or TV show may reduce anxiety keeping you awake at night.
For da Vinci's possible adoption of this practice, Claudio Stampi writes in his 1992 book, "Why We Nap": "One of his secrets, or so it has been claimed, was a unique sleep formula: he would sleep 15 minutes out of every four hours, for a daily total of only 1.5 hours of sleep.
Thai Ngoc has not slept since 1962. An 80-year-old man from Vietnam claims to have been wide awake for 60 years after a fever during his childhood left him unable to sleep.