Why Am I Sleeping So Much? – 12 Severe Reasons to Look For

As per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, newborn babies need 14 to 17 hours of sleep per day, and school-going kids need up to 12 hours. Insane amount of slumber, right?

You want to sleep like a baby but wait! A deadly routine is full of deadlines, a checklist of works to complete, your roles, responsibilities, and on and on. You just can’t do this. Well, you don’t have to.

As you can get by with seven to nine hours of bedtime each day. If you’re still not convinced to get your account of shuteye, looking at its benefits might help.

What’s in sleep for you?

Other than making you feel rested, enough deep sleep has multiple hidden perks that contribute to your mental and physical health.

As per National Institutes of Health –

• You fight off diseases bravely, thanks to your better immune system.¹
• Lifelong diseases stay away from you, such as diabetes and obesity.
• You network better, and it’s connected with mood.
• Your business expands as you get better at decision-making.
• You become the star of your class when you excel in academics and other extracurricular activities, in case you are a student.
• Increases your overall productivity, and your whole life gets healed.

But before you get off to sleep to reimburse your lost slumber, let me introduce you to oversleeping.

Oversleeping is a state when you outdo your prescribed sleep of 7 to 8 hours to get more, resist the wakefulness, have a lie-in most of the time, feel fatigued, approach napping to get more rest as you need it.

In short, it’s all about feeling inactive, sluggish, or just sleepy. Huh!

Before you take it lightly and head towards your to-do list, oversleeping hasn’t any advantage and can be as harmful as sleep deprivation. Besides, it can result from sleep disorders such as insomnia.

What happens when you get over sleepy?

Following are the signs of sleeping too much²–

• Yawning while conversing with others or doing any other task.
• Dozing off.
• Increased nighttime sleep.
• Sleeping during the day or feeling drowsy.
• No enthusiasm for day-to-day activities.
• Not feeling like waking up in the morning.

You ignore these symptoms as they might look like common tiredness emerged from daily activities.

But people with excessive sleepiness, which is also called hypersomnia, face these symptoms even without being engaged in any significant task.

Other than those mild signs, which happen to be immediate, there are several long-term signs and more damaging to your health.

• Gaining weight due to inactivity for a long period.
• Dealing with diabetes or heart disease.
• Complicates your depression.
• Worsens the ability to make decisions.
• You become more vulnerable to accidents.
• It’s linked to mortality.

When does sleeping become oversleeping?

When you notice your shuteye turning into excessive daytime sleepiness³ (EDS) or hypersomnia, which is more than nine hours, it becomes the cause of stress.

• Sleep rejuvenates you, but excessive sleepiness makes you sick.
• You feel even more befuddled and weak instead of refreshed after a long sleep duration.
• It interferes with your life.
• You constantly seek to sleep.

Who faces oversleeping syndrome?

Older adults and those with lower socioeconomic backgrounds tended to sleep more than young people to some extent.

Working people from 35 to 54 years old were less likely to be affected by excessive sleepiness as per a National Representative Sample of 24671 Adults from 15 to 85-year-old.

Who can sleep more?

• If you work longer than usual, you might need a little extra shuteye.
• If your genes allow you to keep sleeping for longer.
• Women but not so long.
• Or fitfully when you feel over-exhausted.

These are only exceptional cases. Otherwise, excessive daytime sleepiness is a sleep disorder – a point to be noted and if you are a victim of this kind of sleep pattern, you may need help on why this happens to you.

Why am I sleeping so much? – Reasons!

Lifestyle habits

Habits make your day and life. But some habits can lead you to stay in bed for longer such as increased alcohol use, staying awake at night deliberately, no exercise, and more.

Medications

Some over-the-counter medicines can trigger sleepiness. These include pain killers, antidepressants, or sleeping pills. This is the reason you feel intoxicated after drug intake.

Sleep deprivation

People who are sleep-deprived or experience sleep insufficiency can get into the zone of excessive sleepiness. Falling asleep at night becomes difficult for them, making them sleepy during the day.

Even if you try to recover your sleep later, there’s no benefit of doing so as it can’t replace those nights’ sleep that you deliberately cut down.

Disturbed circadian rhythm

You might want to complete the whole 8 hours of sleep schedule and enjoy the dream ride, but your work schedule can get in the way of your sleep-wake cycle.

So, you don’t get the desired amount of quality sleep and reach the REM sleep stage which makes you feel refreshed.

That creates a sleep debt and amounts to getting too much sleep during the day. Plus, weakness and irritability caused by too little sleep are also the causes of excessive sleepiness.

Cancer

Life-threatening diseases like cancer can cause you to sleep more. Cancer treatment or chemotherapy results in hypersomnia⁴ when they weaken the inner system.

Hypothyroidism

It’s a medical condition where thyroid hormone levels get decreased and it causes other potential issues such as muscle pain and anxiety which cause health issues and potential sleep debt.

That means hypothyroidism isn’t directly linked to excessive sleeping but forms a chain towards EDS.

Restless Legs Syndrome

It’s a condition in which you feel tingling sensations in your hands, legs, and body and feels the pressure to move them while sleeping and that is enough to keep a person awake making them fall for EDS.

RLS starts from childhood and continues to grow as you age. Around 10 percent of people have RLS in the United States. Hypothyroidism can increase the risk of RLS, which is one of the causes of oversleeping.

Depression

Depression results from insomnia or sleep deprivation and can disrupt sleep, with a huge amount of burden within you. While there’s a connection between depression and too much sleep.

A sleep psychologist, Dr. Drerup says that 15 percent of people suffering from depression, especially atypical depression, tend to oversleep. People with atypical depression feel positive but occasionally.

Depression impacts your sleep cycles heavily in some way or the other but oversleeping only increases depression, and does not give rise to it.

Depression can co-exist with sleep apnea, a sleep disorder that causes sleep interruption, resulting in mood swings and stress, this may lead you to sleep more to recover from it. That means it also comes in your way of sleeping peacefully.

Another factor that gives way to depression and then excessive sleepiness is the disrupted sleep-wake cycle.

Sleep Apnea

It’s a dangerous sleep disorder and its more common type is obstructive sleep apnea, which causes you to snore heavily and disrupt breathing continuously while sleeping.

That means you can’t have a deep sleep because you tend to wake up many times during the night but for some seconds, causing you to feel drowsy during the day.

A cross-sectional study on 195 patients with different levels of obstructive sleep apnea in which 89.4% were males and 10.6% were females, showed that 87.2% resulted in excessive daytime sleepiness.

Narcolepsy

It’s a sleep disorder, though not so common cause of oversleeping, in which you get bouts of sleep ranging from some seconds to an hour.

Mayo Clinic explains that it’s a long-term disease with no cure. You can only manage it by making changes to your lifestyle and with medications. Also, it’s categorized as type 2 narcolepsy resulting in low concentration when it leads to EDS.

According to this article,  narcolepsy affects 0.02 to 0.18 percent of people and belongs to the category of primary hypersomnias.

Cataplexy

Sometimes, cataplexy follows narcolepsy⁵, a kind of attack that means a loss of muscle movement due to heightened emotions such as happiness and surprise. It’s known as type 1 narcolepsy and is usually mistaken for epilepsy.

Socioeconomic status and other factors

Some factors such as illnesses, stress, unemployment, or poor life standard are associated with lower socioeconomic backgrounds and cause poor sleep, leading to sleep disorders which includes hypersomnia as well.

The research involving 159,856 individuals presented to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine revealed these findings –

• 26 percent of people with low income while 8 percent with higher income faced sleep issues.
• Employed people had better sleep than retired people or homemakers.
• Married people had better sleep patterns in comparison to singles or separated.
• 22 percent of women had trouble with sleep whereas only 16 percent of men faced sleep issues.
• Younger people between the age of 18 to 24 faced sleep issues than older ones.

How can you fix your long hours of bedtime?

If you’ve been dealing with excessive sleep for a long period and it’s interfering with your life, you may need to approach a sleep specialist. Although, some lifestyle changes can favor you. Following are the points of consideration:

A must-have sleep diary

Sleep is too important a phenomenon to ignore because it keeps you away from tons of diseases. Making necessary changes to suit your sleep needs would certainly help you in the long term.

Having a diary to record your sleeping habits isn’t pricey but saves you from future hassle. Recording your sleeping patterns such as when you fall asleep and wake up each day.

Or note, whether you feel rested after a night’s sleep, or whether you wake up in the middle of your sleep. These findings help you manage your sleep routine and to know how much sleep you need.

Following a sleep routine

It’s not a myth that you have a circadian rhythm and that functions as per your habits and light and darkness. Sleep disorders or other ailments can disrupt your body’s natural circadian rhythms.

When you shift your work or any other thing at the time of rest, you feel tired or groggy as you try to throw off your sleep-wake routine. Simply, adjusting your sleep patterns or time would easily free you from too much sleep.

Increase your chances to sleep by your environment

If you try to hit the sack while the lights are on and the room doesn’t allow you to rest, you are less likely to fall asleep. Even if you slept, it’d be of low quality causing you to feel drowsy after you wake up.

So it’s better to set the slumber mood by some darkness without any noise. Replace any uncomfortable mattress and make sure your bed is warm and cozy to make you sleepy as soon as you get into it.

A big NO to

• Television night shows
• Blue light-emitting gadgets
• Late night work or chitchat
• Caffeine
• Heavy exercise
• Alcohol

Accept sleep inducers to improve sleep quality

• Meditation
• Reading but a book not online
• Listening light music
• Writing unchecked works, tomorrow’s planning in a diary
• Forgiving yourself for the mistakes made during the day

Sleep tests

The Epworth Sleepiness Scale can measure your sleep patterns in different situations. You just have to rate yourself from 0 to 3 in response to various day-to-day activities and add scores to know whether you are dealing with over sleepiness.

Multiple Sleep Latency Test

This test measures your sleep disturbances in a sleep center as you nap. So it might help you sort out your sleep problems.

Alter your habits

Regular physical activity of any kind is necessary to function well. In the absence of exercise, you feel sluggish and it impairs your system too. Exercising once a day can certainly help you regulate your sleep.

Food rich in nutrients especially greenies is a must to set you up healthy for a better life and sleep health too. Just take care of the food intake before bed and warm milk can only benefit you to fall asleep.

Excessive sleeping is no way to adjust your sleep deprivation on your busy days. It can only increase the risk of various disorders and is responsible for reducing your lifespan.

Be smart to change your poor sleep habits and ensure a life free of diseases.

1. Rayasam, Aditya, et al. “Immune responses in stroke: how the immune system contributes to damage and healing after stroke and how this knowledge could be translated to better cures?.” Immunology 154.3 (2018): 363-376. ↩︎
2. Ayas, Najib T. “If you weigh too much, maybe you should try sleeping more.” Sleep 33.2 (2010): 143-144. ↩︎
3. Pagel, J. F. “Excessive daytime sleepiness.” American family physician 79.5 (2009): 391-396. ↩︎
4. Billiard, Michael, and Yves Dauvilliers. “Idiopathic hypersomnia.” Sleep medicine reviews 5.5 (2001): 349-358. ↩︎
5. Kornum, Birgitte R., et al. “Narcolepsy.” Nature reviews Disease primers 3.1 (2017): 1-19. ↩︎

Last Updated on July 22, 2024 by Sathi Chakraborty, MSc Biology