eli5 what is the difference between sleeping until you cant anymore (12+ hours) and sleeping until you could get up (4-6 hours)?

Question

What are the pros and cons of each situation?

In: 8

Answer 1

my amateur understanding of sleep is that researchers still don’t know why or how much sleep we need.

OTOH there are correlations between health/mental issues for both “too little” and “too much” sleep, compared to healthy people.

The best explanation I have heard is that if you can sleep, you should but sleeping 12 hours would likely indicate other issues as would only being able to sleep 4 hours