As if it’s not bad enough that lack of sleep can affect your bottom line, studies show that an excess of sleep can jeopardize your health.
“Regularly logging more than nine hours of sleep a night may be a sign of an underlying medical condition, but it also puts you at risk for a whole host of health concerns,” the Huffington Post reports.
Among such health concerns are some of the most deadly — and costly — including:
Diabetes: Researchers at Université Laval’s Faculty of Medicine in Quebec City found that people who sleep more than eight hours per night (or less than seven hours) have a 2.5 times greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s EurekAlert reported.
Obesity: The same researchers found that subjects who slept nine to 10 hours per night (and those who slept five to six hours) were more likely to develop obesity than subjects who slept for seven to eight hours.
Their findings, published in “Sleep,” include that the over-sleepers and under-sleepers were 35 percent and 25 percent, respectively, more likely to experience a weight gain of 5 kilograms (about 11 pounds).
In addition, over-sleepers were 21 percent more likely to develop obesity, while under-sleepers were 27 percent more likely to develop obesity.
Heart problems: Research led by Dr. Rohit Arora of the Chicago Medical School found that people getting more than eight hours of sleep were twice as likely to develop angina (chest pain) and 1.1 times more likely to develop coronary artery disease (narrowing of the blood vessels that supply the heart with blood and oxygen), HealthDay reported.
Of course, getting too little sleep also increased one’s risk for heart problems – heart attack, congestive heart failure and stroke.
Death: An analysis of 16 studies that included more than 1.3 million participants, also published in “Sleep,” associated participants who slept more than eight hours per night with a 1.3 times greater risk of death.
If this bleak news has motivated you to improve the quality of your sleep, check out “18 Affordable Tips to Help You Sleep Like a Baby.”
How many hours of sleep are you getting? What are your best tips for sound sleep? Leave a comment below or on our Facebook page.
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