Why is sleeping so bad?

It is known that healthy sleep ideally lasts 8 hours. Without it, we feel sluggish, our memory and emotional state deteriorate. After all, the brain also needs rest. Unfortunately, scientists have not yet found a battery that would allow humans to store energy in advance. We are still dependent on biorhythms, many people suffer from sleep disorders. Most of the time you have to sleep in on weekends. It seems that the longer the sleep, the better. But research says otherwise. Let us tell you why.

As with nutrition, everything needs to be in moderation. With excessive sleep and lack of sleep, sleep phases are disrupted, which affects health and confuses consciousness. The fact is that in the slow phase, the physical resources of the body are restored, and REM sleep normalizes the functioning of our brain, in other words, it “sorts files” and “clears the cache.” Due to disruptions in sleep patterns, even strange situations may occur, some of which we wrote about in the material on lucid dreams. But there is another reason.

Doctors confirm that sleeping more than 8 hours increases the risk of heart disease, especially heart attack and stroke. This is because blood flow slows down during prolonged sleep, increasing the likelihood of thrombosis and blockage of blood vessels. In 2016, in the journal Scientific Reports, a group of Chinese-Canadian scientists published a study in which they concluded that daytime sleepiness and the habit of sleeping longer are caused by hypersomnia (excessive need for sleep), a symptom of a metabolic disease. disorders, heart disease and diabetes.

Meanwhile, strange and disturbing conditions such as apnea (cessation of breathing during sleep), restless legs syndrome (burning and tingling in the limbs), bruxism (teeth grinding), hormonal imbalances and narcolepsy also occur.

The one myth that many people still believe is that weekday sleeplessness can be compensated for on weekends. Unfortunately we do not have the ability to “charge the battery”. A 2019 study in the journal Current Biology found that people who followed this pattern not only performed worse on tasks but also gained extra weight.

Should I be worried if I want to sleep longer than usual? Of course, it is the doctor who can objectively evaluate the health condition. However, there is still no need to panic. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich found that the love of long sleeps may be caused by the inherited ABCC9 gene. To do this, researchers asked trial participants how much sleep they got on weekends and then took a DNA test from them. As a result, the gene was found in everyone who got more than 3 hours of normal sleep on average. Moreover, this does not pose a threat to their health. Why this function is needed from an evolutionary perspective remains a mystery.