I often hear people say they don’t like sleeping too much because they feel groggy afterward.
What follows is often, “I don’t need a lot of sleep” or “See, too much sleep isn’t good for me”.
Too much sleep can be problematic, but only if it’s chronic over-sleep, like every single night for years.
There’s a misunderstanding of what your body is telling you with an acute episode of “too much sleep”.
If on a particular night you get 9-10 hours of sleep, don’t wake up at all and either feel groggy the next day OR don’t sleep well the next night, it makes sense! Especially if you’ve been low on sleep for days, weeks, months or (yikes!) years!
The likely culprit is sleep deprivation.
Have you been skimping on sleep consistently?
OR
Did you have a rough night of sleep recently?
If you slept 9-10 hours like a rock on a particular night, you probably NEEDED it.
When we stay awake too long on a particular night or with regular consistency our bodies produce extra wakeful hormones like cortisol to support the wakefulness. When your body can’t support this excessive stimulation anymore it forces you to sleep extra and clears those hormones. Then comes the letdown…
The sleep hangover. It’s a withdrawal of sorts.
The way I look at it is that when you got the extra sleep, your body stopped producing extra “stress” hormones and now it doesn’t feel so good.
If you didn’t sleep well the next few nights, that’s likely because you got caught up on the sleep you needed and sleep pressure (in the form of adenosine) reduced and you are now coping with the remaining stress hormones circulating in your system.
Cortisol is a hormone that needs to be produced every time you need it and it doesn’t dissipate as soon as you’re finished being stressed. It stays in your system. And you will keep producing excess cortisol until you break the stress cycle.
Sleep and wakefulness happen based upon which is higher - sleep drive or wake drive.
Finding a balance and homeostasis with sleep and wakefulness is the only way to get off the rollercoaster of exhaustion and over-stimulation.
Next time you sleep 9-10 hours, I challenge you to try and sleep that much for the next week.
If you get into bed when you first start feeling the downhill pull of tiredness in the evening and stay consistent with that and a regular rising time in the morning - you can find a balance.
Give yourself the allowance for sleep and see what happens…you deserve it.
If you need extra help getting there, try my free sleep journal.
