Too Much Sleep Can Be Dangerous

By Dr. Mercola

Sleep is such an important part of your overall health that no amount of healthful food and exercise can counteract the ill effects of poor sleeping habits.

Researchers have linked poor sleep to a number of ailments, from short-term memory loss and behavioral problems, to weight gain, diabetes, and even increased risk of cancer, just to mention a few.

Yet while most of the literature emphasizes the ramifications of insufficient sleep, research shows too much sleep isn’t good either.¹ Studies have linked excessive sleep to health risks ranging from depression to an increased risk for stroke, just to name a few.The hormone melatonin acts as a marker for biological timing, meaning it influences what time of day or night your body thinks it is, regardless of what time the clock says. As darkness sets in, and less light hits your eyes, your melatonin production increases. In addition to making you feel mildly sleepy, its primary function is to message all the biological clocks synchronizing to your master clock that “it is now nighttime; start performing nighttime activities.”

While some activities are shut down, others are activated.

As mentioned in the featured interview, melatonin also controls over 500 genes — including genes involved in angiogenesis, the process of growing blood vessels to feed tumor growth — so it’s very important for health and basic biological functioning, and it’s entirely regulated by environmental light conditions. This really tells us something about the importance of living as closely in tune with the environmental cycle of day and night as possible.

Somewhere between 50 to 1,000 lux is the activation range within which light will begin to suppress melatonin production, which instructs the biological clocks to perform daytime activities and maintain wakefulness. Were you to live in the wilderness without artificial lighting, you’d automatically get progressively sleepier as soon as the sun sets, and would wake with the rise of the sun.

Since melatonin is a regulator of your sleep cycle, when it is suppressed, there is less stimulation to promote sleepiness at a healthy bedtime. This contributes to people staying up later and missing valuable sleep. One 2011 study¹¹ compared daily melatonin profiles in individuals staying in room light (<200 lux) versus dim light (<3 lux).

Results showed that, compared with dim light, exposure to room light before bedtime suppressed melatonin in 99 percent of individuals, and shortened the time period when the body has an elevated melatonin level by about 90 minutes.

That’s an hour and a half of tossing and turning in bed, unable to fall asleep. The authors concluded that:“[C]hronically exposing oneself to electrical lighting in the late evening disrupts melatonin signaling and could therefore potentially impact sleep, thermoregulation, blood pressure, and glucose homeostasis.”

How to Support Your Circadian Rhythm and Sleep Better for Optimal Health

Even minor adjustments to your daily routine and sleeping area can go a long way to ensure uninterrupted, restful sleep and, thereby, better health. I suggest you read through my full set of 33 healthy sleep guidelines for all of the details, but to start, consider implementing the following changes to ensure more high quality shut-eye:

Sources and References

• ¹ New York Times November 20, 2015
• ² Neurology February 25, 2015, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000001371
• ³ CBS News February 26, 2015
• ⁴ NDTV October 7, 2015
• ⁵ Huffington Post February 15, 2015
• ⁶ Sleep 2014: 37(2)
• ⁷ American Academy of Sleep Medicine January 31, 2014
• ⁸ Eurekalert April 21, 2009
• ⁹ Huffington Post March 27, 2012
• ¹⁰ Journal of Psychiatric Research September 20, 2013
• ¹¹ J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011 March; 96(3): E463–E472

The post Too Much Sleep Can Be Dangerous appeared first on LewRockwell.