That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Oversleeping

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

In this week's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss how oversleeeping affects your brain, for better or worse. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Byte. All right, this one's a question from you, the listeners. Quite simply, can you oversleep and is oversleeping bad for the brain? Tough question to answer. In principle, most people over the age of 15 should sleep seven to nine hours a night. And that's for the lifespan. As people get in above 60, they tend to sleep less, but they should still be sleeping seven to nine hours a night.

It's just, they have a host of other issues that, that prevent them from sleeping. And when you're very young, say sub 15, sub 16, depends on the individual, sleeping more is normal. It's part of growth and your body needs that sleep to mature and keep growing. But if you're in that normal sort of adult range, can you oversleep? Yes, you can. The problem with oversleeping is it's typically linked to other factors, diabetes, heart disease, depression. So if you are oversleeping, then you probably need to talk to a doctor and to look into why you're oversleeping. And the problems that come from oversleeping, obesity, headaches, back pain, depression, heart disease, even death. Interestingly enough, there's research that shows that people that sleep nine or more hours a night on average have significantly higher death rates than people sleeping seven or more hours a night on average have significantly higher death

rates than people sleeping seven to eight hours a night. No one really knows why, but it is a correlation that's out there. And in terms of the brain, basically we talked about brain fog on a previous episode, but oversleeping has been linked to brain fog. Your brain basically should be awake and it's not. And because you've overslept, everything's just a little bit slow to get fog. Your brain basically should be awake and it's not. And because you've overslept, everything's just a little bit slow to get going. Those neurons aren't ready to do their daily job. So the common thing that we talk about is brain fog. So can you oversleep? Yes. If you are oversleeping, please talk to a doctor. That's one of those ones you probably want to look into. And it's not great for your brain either.

Anyway, that's another neuroscience bite. Don't forget, you can check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com, links to Etsy and Patreon. Of course, message us ideas on X or threads at thatneuroscienceguy. We're getting all sorts of ideas for neuroscience bites. And we're going to use every bite to answer a question and the bigger ones we're going to put into full episodes.

And of course, thank you so much for listening to the podcast and please subscribe. My name is Olive Craig Olson and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.