Sleeping Towards Death: Can you sleep too much?
Turns out, yes you can. In fact, sleeping too much could mean an even shorter life span than getting too little sleep. According to one study, sleep for nine of more hours could increase your risk of death by 30% compared to 12% if you got less than six hours per night. The same study suggested that the optimal number of sleep hours per night was seven.
The interesting study reminds us that our health is often dictated by our bodies’ homeostasis, a state of equilibrium. It just happens to be that the perfectly balanced sleep schedule for an average adult seems to be seven hours — kind of like how our internal temperature is around 37.0 °C(98.6 °F) when we are healthy.
Not surprisingly, the connection between our health and homeostasis goes far as to explain why we yawn.
Why do we yawn? Because we’re tired — too sleepy?
Nope, apparently not. We yawn to cool our brains.
Like a computer that heats up when it’s overworked and needs a break, our brains rise in temperature when we are exhausted and sleep deprived. Similar to our computers that crash or slow down when the overworked hardware generates too much heat, our brains cope with exhaustion and sleep deprivation by breathing in more oxygen. In other words, we yawn to cool our internal hard drives.
To keep your computer working for its maximum lifespan, you need to let it rest — just like your brain.
The complicated thing about rest is, however, that there are various forms of it.
Many people are unaware that there may be more ways to shut down a computer than you think. There are four ways to shut down a computer — each with its own benefits and disadvantages. Just in case you’re curious the four power-down states of your computer are: shut down, sleep, hibernate, and and hybrid.
In the same way that resting your computer comes in different forms, we can also reset our brains through different ways. In the same way that our computer have various benefits and disadvantages for the different methods to power-down, we can be creative in the way that we get the ideal amount of sleep every day and night.
The next question then, of course, is how to get the ideal seven hours of sleep every day. Like food and sex, we need to aim for a healthy balance when it comes to our sleep schedule. We know that getting a gym membership and eating more fruits and vegetables is important to maintain our health, but how many people are actually able to follow through? It seems, not many.
What can we do to find that healthy balance?
Like the advice that many nutritionist and health coaches give, getting the ideal sleep hours everyday is to make a system that is easy to follow by planning ahead. Set up an alarm on your phone to remind you that you set all of your technology aside for 30 minutes before you go to bed. Try to limit your coffee after 2pm. If you notice that you can’t get yourself to sleep seven hours every night, consider replenishing some of your energy with catnaps during the day.
As our society is becoming more health conscious, we now have access to various services that make it easier to make better choices. People can buy organic produce from Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. They can download a phone app to count calories and suggest healthy recipes. Our Fitbit track our daily exercise to encourage us to be more active.
With the rising napping industry in East Asia, we can expect various products and services in the future to help us make smarter choices for our sleep. Take for instance, nap pods (known as energy pods in Google headquarters) that offer employees a space to take a short snooze throughout their working hours.
Fitting all of your seven hours in one block every night is tough. Why not break it up throughout the day — similar to eating snacks in the afternoon so that you don’t gorge yourself at night? Why don’t you save time for the sanitary and peaceful energy pods instead of your dirty bedroom on your noisy apartment floor?
The need for such services will likely increase not decrease over time.
Yes, we can sleep ourselves to shorter life spans. Getting too much sleep isn’t the answer to a healthy lifestyle.
However, studies consistently find that Americans are sleep deprived. While oversleep is also a potential problem in our society, sleep deprivation is an issue that is more rampant (kind of like how obesity is a larger issue in the U.S. than malnutrition).
So, if you feel like you sleep too much, you should consider how to reach that ideal seven hours. However, if you’re like the rest of us who aren’t getting enough sleep every night, consider a nap. It might make all the difference.
To learn more about how snoozing more (or less) can change your life for the better, preorder my book, The Art of Napping: The Sleeping Samurai and the Dormant Dragon, here.
