Why is it actually bad for you? I know you’re at greater risk for heart disease and other things, but why?
In: Biology
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Your body has a natural rhythm called the Circadian Rhythm. It is supposed to be 24-hours long, and regulates when you feel sleepy and awake.
Disruptions to this rhythm, through under or oversleeping, can mess up the timings and amounts of hormones your body releases. Since hormones regulate everything in your body, this can cause further issues, such as the heart attack you alluded to.
Specifically for heart attack, the cause is the release of hormones by your immune system that cause inflamation, which results in your heart arteries being clogged up. There is also some evidence that your hunger regulating hormones go all whack too, which causes you to overeat and gain weight, which is also a well-known factor for heart diseases.
We don’t know that it is. Correlation is NOT causation.
Sleeping more than ~10 hours is correlated with a variety of health problems, but it’s not known for certain that the extra sleep is the cause. Consider some of the things that make people want to sleep more: depression, sleep apnea, infections, a variety of medications, etc. All of these things either cause other health problems, or indicate that other health problems are present. Lower life expectancy is tied to sleeping longer mainly because being tired and needing more sleep is a symptom of a lot of things that shorten your life.
Sleep apnea, and not getting enough oxygen while you sleep, is definitely tied to heart disease. Though it too is also caused by other things that contribute to heart disease. There are more definite mechanisms to tie low oxygen levels to causing heart damage, while “sleeping too much” does not have well demonstrated methods for how it causes heart disease.
Saying that sleeping too much is bad for you is like saying that seeing doctors frequently causes you to die. Yes, a lot of people who go to doctors frequently end up dying, because when you’ve got something badly wrong with your health, you seek medical care a lot.
In short, people who need more sleep are people who have health problems, and if you find yourself needing a lot of sleep you should try to figure out what the root cause is, not worry that sleeping too much is harming you.
Okay, so imagine your body is like a car. Just like a car needs the right amount of gas to go, your body needs the right amount of sleep to work best. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re like a car with not enough gas: it can’t go very far and doesn’t work well.
But if you put too much gas in the car, it can’t hold all of it, and it might spill or cause problems. It’s kind of like that with sleep, too. If you sleep too much, your body starts to get a little lazy, and certain parts might not work as they should. Your heart, which is like the engine of the car, might not pump blood as well because it’s used to being more relaxed from all the extra sleep. And just like a car engine that doesn’t run often, some of the parts can start to get problems.
Also, when you’re sleeping, you’re not moving much, so your body doesn’t get to exercise or be strong. It’s like if the car is always parked and never driven, some parts might stop working as well because they’re not being used.
So, just like a car needs the right amount of gas, your body needs the right amount of sleep: not too little and not too much, so you can run and play and do everything you need to do!
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