We spend one third of our lives asleep and when you add up all those hours, it equates to approximately 26 years, 9,490 days or 227,760 hours.
And whilst the thought of sleeping sounds blissful after a long day at work, it may actually be the reason we are feeling worse as sleeping too much could be problematic.
According to John Hopkins Medicine, oversleeping is associated with many health problems including:
- Type 2 diabetes
- Heart disease
- Obesity
- Depression
- Headaches
- Greater risk of dying from a medical condition
So how much sleep is too much sleep?
Sleep as we all know comes down to your age and your health as well as many other factors.
The average person needs around seven to nine hours per night however if you regularly need more than nine hours of sleep, there could be an underlying issue that needs addressed, says Vsevolod Polotsky who is a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM).
The National Sleep Foundation recommends these targets for making sure you log enough sleep each day:
- Newborns (0-3 months): 14-17 hours (including naps and nighttime)
- Infants (4-11 months): 12-15 hours (including naps and nighttime)
- Toddlers (1-2 years): 11-14 hours (including naps and nighttime)
- Preschoolers (3-5): 10-13 hours (including naps and nighttime)
- School age children (6-13): 9-11 hours
- Teenagers (14-17): 8-10 hours
- Adults (18-64): 7-9 hours
- Older adults (65+): 7-8 hours
Why am I always so tired?
Polotsky states that "a number of conditions can disrupt sleep or interfere with the quality of your slumber, leading you to feel tired and sluggish even after spending eight hours in bed."
These conditions include:
- Sleep apnea - a breathing disorder that causes brief pauses in breathing during sleep
- Restless legs syndrome - a brain disorder that causes an unpleasant and sometimes overwhelming urge to move your legs when you're at rest
- Bruxism - in which you grind or clench your teeth during sleep
- Chronic pain
- Certain medications
In addition to conditions that can "significantly impair the quality of your sleep" there are reasons that will instead increase the amount of sleep you need.
Those include:
- Narcolepsy - a brain disorder that interferes with the body's sleep-wake cycles
- Delayed sleep phase syndrome - a disorder in which your circadian rhythm, or biological clock, keeps you up into the early hours making it hard to wake in the morning
- Idiopathic hypersomnia - a disorder that causes excessive sleepiness for unknown reasons
Despite difficulty getting some shuteye, it's not something you should be ignoring.
Polotsky adds that people can get sleep studies if they feel something needs to be investigated - especially if your sleeping pattern changes dramatically as it may be a sign that you have an underlying medical condition such as heart disease, diabetes or depression.
However despite the eight hour rule of thumb, there have been studies showing that we may be programmed to sleeping in two periods.
According to WebMD, segmented sleep was a thing of the past however it may be beneficial to some.
They explain that in the pre-industrial times (before electricity) it was "normal to get up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, according to historian Roger Ekirch, author of At Day's Close: Night in Times Past."
Here people would spend time praying, getting work done and even visiting their neighbours and afterwards just fell back asleep until morning.
They continue: "We may be hardwired to sleep in two periods. A study by the National Institute of Mental Health looked at how people slept when they got 10 hours of light a day - about as much as on a winter's day. Researchers found that those folks got their shut-eye in two chunks, with a few hours awake in between."
Mary Carskadon, PhD, a sleep researcher at Brown University added: "Some people follow that split schedule today using the middle-of-the-night awake period as a creative time to think, read, meditate, or work.
"There are people for whom that seems to be a productive way to live and suits them just fine. But it's hard to do if you have family and a job you have to go to every day."
