Last Updated on April 23, 2020
“Why do I feel tired when I wake up after a loooooong night’s (and morning’s) sleep?”
You have probably asked yourself this question many times. It’s frustrating because you are supposed to wake up feeling reinvigorated and ready to face the day. Or at least, what’s left of it. Instead, you wake up feeling like staying in bed the entire afternoon.
This is one of the most common signs of sleeping too much. When you oversleep, you mess with your internal rhythms and biological clock.
Let’s imagine you usually wake up at 7 am to get ready to go to work, but you decide to sleep until noon on a Saturday. Your body cells will do what they always do: they will start using energy at 7 am.
So you will wake up at noon with an extremely confused biological clock and feeling tired. This is the same mechanism as with jet lag.
3. Memory problems
Are you having trouble remembering certain things? Like where you’ve placed your car keys or what was discussed in last week’s meeting with your co-workers? This might be because you are getting older and way too much sleep.
The empirical evidence is, once again, crystal-clear. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, people who oversleep (and those who undersleep) have brains that are two years older than the ones who get the ideal seven to eight hours of sleep.
Talk to your doctor about your problem, and he will give you advice on how to stop oversleeping.
4. Pain and inflammation
If you often wake up experiencing a moderate to intense back and neck pain, you either have a poor-quality mattress, or you have slept for too long in an awkward position.
Besides pain, oversleeping can also cause chronic inflammation. According to some medical studies, people who oversleep have high levels of a small protein called cytokine.
Cytokines are produced mainly by the immune system, and they help regulate the body’s inflammatory response. This means that if you are regularly sleeping too much, you might be dealing with chronic inflammation.
