I just don’t understand, some days, usually on weekends, I’ll try and wake up after a normal amount of sleep (like 7.5-8 hours) but I feel too exhausted to wake up.
Then I’ll end up sleeping like 12 hours and I feel like crap all day. Why is this?
In: Biology
Sleep is unfortunately very poorly understood.
Most biological necessities, like food, water, and oxygen, have very easy to observe effects on the body. Food is broken down by the digestive system, an entire system of the body with a half dozen organs devoted to it, and turned into energy stores used by nearly every cell of the body. Water is the solvent of the solutions that fill our cells, the spaces between our cells, and the insides of multiple organs. Oxygen accepts electrons as the final step in the electron transport chain, the series of steps that produce most of the body’s ATP.
But sleep has subtle effects on nearly every system on the body, through layers and layers of indirect effects, and it’s not like we’ve got an organ or two devoted strictly to handling sleep, or not one that we know about anyway.
While I understand that this isn’t a very satisfying answer, and you’re likely to get plenty of answers without any scientific basis that at least feel more comforting, the most likely answer to your question is that we don’t know. There may be some obscure bit of research some academic sleep lab or another has published at some point trying to provide a reason for why too much sleep leaves you groggy, but ultimately your answer probably sits in the “things we don’t know” corner of science.
If I had to make some sort of educated guess though, I’d remind you that too much or too little food can make you feel bad, as can too much or too little water, certainly too little oxygen, and while you likely haven’t had a chance to experience it, too much as well. Most of our biological necessities, perhaps all of them, have a “happy medium” range where we are most healthy and most comfortable. There isn’t much reason to assume sleep is different. We already know sleep deprivation is at least mildly unpleasant for most of us, is it really that strange to think that too much sleep is any different?
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