Everyone knows too little sleep is bad for your body.
If you’re getting less than 7-8 hours your body never has time to properly recover from the day.
This is why too little sleep is said to be one of the worst things you could do for your body.
But new research indicates that too much sleep might also be bad for you too.
How?
Well as researchers noted after compiling pooled data from 3 million people oversleeping could negatively affect multiple systems in the body.
All of which may lead to an early death.
Scientists at Keele University in the United Kingdom published their research in the Journal of the American Heart Association showing there was a “’J-shaped’ relationship between duration of sleep and deaths.”
The same “J-shaped relationship” they discovered for oversleepers and early death has been seen in one of the leading killers in the Western world.
Cardiovascular disease.
This led them to say that advisements for sleeping over the 7-8 hour mark might “be associated with a moderate degree of harm” when compared to getting less than the normal 7-8 hours of sleep.
Medical News Today wrote:
The J-shaped relationship showed that the size of the risk rose in line with greater duration of sleep. Sleeping for 9 hours, for example, carried a 14 percent higher risk of death, while 10-hour sleeps carried a 30 percent higher risk.
The results also showed that poor-quality sleep was linked to a 44 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease.
“Our study,” says lead study author Dr. Chun Shing Kwok, a clinical lecturer in cardiology at Keele University, “has an important public health impact in that it shows that excessive sleep is a marker of elevated cardiovascular risk.”
The researchers say though a link clearly exists, they’re not sure exactly why sleeping more could damage your heart.
As they concluded
Too much sleep may be linked to cardiovascular diseases because of existing conditions that increase fatigue. These include persistent inflammatory conditions and anemia.
Scientists also tie low physical activity, depression, unemployment, and low socioeconomic status to longer sleep. These may contribute to, but they could also mask, the link between longer sleep duration and cardiovascular disease and risk of death.
Especially given that most of the science and guidelines on heart disease don’t have much to say about oversleep.
Even though prior studies centering on cardiovascular disease and heart health are out there, none of those studies observed a relationship between the increase in cardiovascular disease for every additional hour after 8 hours slept.
Nor have those previous studies delved into the risk related to sleep quality.
Ultimately they believe more research needs to be performed on this association.
Especially because the more a person sleeps, the worse the problem gets.
