The science news of the week: Much has been written about the harmful effects of sleep deprivation on the human body. Not only does sleep deprivation affect mood and concentration, it can also lead to many serious diseases. That is why doctors recommend getting enough sleep.
But what if you start sleeping longer than your body needs for normal recovery? The website Metafact.io surveyed 26 neurobiologists and sleep specialists to see if they thought oversleeping was harmful, and 85% of them said they didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Dr. Joe Caldwell, an expert from the U.S. Navy Medical Research Unit, emphasized with military punctuality that the optimal duration of sleep should be considered seven consecutive hours, and according to his words, each additional hour “taken away” from this sleep will lead to additional negative consequences for health. These consequences can include an increased risk of developing diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. Most experts believe that prolonged sleep combined with a lack of physical activity should, in theory, be associated with increased health risks – even life-threatening ones. However, they have no actual data, and the few experiments that have been conducted indicate the opposite.
“Extending sleep beyond the usual norm positively affects many bodily functions – blood pressure and pain sensitivity decrease. But insulin sensitivity increases,” says Dr. Monica Haak of Harvard.
“The problem with determining whether “long sleep is bad” is that we don’t know exactly why people who like to sleep long have health problems,” says Stanford researcher Jamie Zeitzer. “Maybe they sleep so long because some medical problem forces them to, since sleep is known to be the best medicine.”
Many experts agree that there may be other factors that link long sleep to adverse outcomes, but no one knows what they are.
A healthy person is not at risk of getting too much sleep, scientists say. We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. The number of episodes should remain the same.
The end of the story: Advertising podcasts. “The most plausible explanation might be that some illness drives excessive sleep, rather than vice versa,” says Dr. William Killgor of the University of Arizona. “However, in the absence of confirmed research, this remains a ‘chicken or egg’ question.”
As Dr. James Weir of Eastern Virginia Medical School points out, we shouldn’t worry about getting too much sleep: “A healthy person is not in danger of overdosing on sleep because they will simply wake up – either they will continue to lie in bed, which would be weird and uncomfortable, or they will get up.”
Finally, as the experts surveyed noted, a change in sleep duration can be a good indicator that something is happening to you.
“If you suddenly find that you need much more than seven hours of sleep to function normally, if you suddenly feel like sleeping significantly longer than usual, you should probably see a doctor,” Dr. Killgor advises. “Because even if the long sleep itself isn’t harming you, the cause that triggered it may be.
The crew of the Apollo 14 mission. In the 1970s, when people were just starting to explore space travel to the moon (it seemed that we were just a step away from establishing lunar and then Mars bases, and from there humanity would go into deep space), they took the most incredible items into space. Then the head of the U.S. Forest Service asked astronaut Stuart Allen Roos, who was about to fly to the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission, to take something small but very symbolic – seeds of various trees on Earth. Rus was not chosen by chance; he began his career as a firefighter parachutist, dropped from an airplane to fight wildfires in hard-to-reach areas. Of course, as the savior of the forests of Russia, he could not refuse the chief forester of the country. However, the seeds, of which there were about 500, never reached the lunar surface – Rusa was the pilot of the command module “Kitty Hawk” and did not land on the Moon himself, but he completed 34 orbits around our satellite. Upon returning to Earth, the astronauts (along with the seeds in the container) went through the normal decontamination procedure, but the container came loose and the seeds were mixed up. At first, the scientists thought that they would not sprout after such a harsh treatment, but they decided to try to germinate them anyway – and to their surprise, they found that most of them sprouted. At that time, very little was known about the effects of cosmic radiation on both astronauts and everything on board their spacecraft, including seeds. Later, it was discovered that seeds are more resilient than humans and can withstand radiation doses 200 times higher than the human limit without losing their ability to germinate. It was hard to predict how weightlessness and other factors would affect them, but one way or another, trees that sprouted from space seeds were planted in various parts of America. When Rus died in 1994, a lunar sycamore was planted at his grave. As it turned out, about 15 seedlings were sent to the United Kingdom, but unlike America, no one bothered to mark on maps where the trees were planted, so now the Royal Astronomical Society, in collaboration with the British Space Agency, has organized a search to find these trees. “Space has an amazing way of inspiring people,” said Libby Jackson, an agency employee. “We’ve already had the opportunity to watch with excitement the planting of apple trees grown in space from seeds of the famous Newton’s apple tree, so it would be very interesting to find out what has happened to these lunar trees that have made it to the UK.”
Aqueduct of Emperor Valens in Istanbul. “Water supply, ‘worked by the slaves of Rome,’ as Mayakovsky wrote, has come to our days with an ancient problem: it needs periodic cleaning, which means – temporarily shutting off water.” As archaeologists have discovered, Emperor Valens’ water supply system in the 5th century worked perfectly, providing Constantinople’s residents with a constant supply of fresh water despite being one of the longest in the ancient world. It was supplied with water from springs sometimes 120 kilometers from the city, and included a system of large stone canals as high as a man, 90 bridges, and numerous tunnels that, at its peak, exceeded 500 kilometers in length. Imagine what it was like to maintain this infrastructure! Of course, the water supply system was supposed to clog with sediments in the water, but when archaeologists examined the calcium carbonate deposits at the bottom of the aqueduct, they were surprised to find that these deposits had accumulated there in no more than 30 years. Although it is known that the canal was in operation for several centuries – at least until the 12th century (and through the lead pipes later laid on top of the aqueduct, water was still being supplied to the city, which had already changed its name from Constantinople to Istanbul by the 19th century). “This means that the entire aqueduct had to be cleaned and kept in working condition during the Byzantine Empire, practically until the moment it stopped functioning,” explains one of the authors of the study (the results of which were published in Geoarchaeology), Gül Surmelihtindi of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. The answer to the question of how the aqueduct could be cleaned without shutting off the water was to be found in its design. The central part of the 50-kilometer aqueduct consisted of two channels that ran on top of each other, sometimes intersecting on two-story bridges. This system of double canals allowed ancient engineers to clean them sequentially without blocking access to the water.
The famous Pont du Gard aqueduct in southern France is another example of engineering genius dating back to the Roman Empire. By the way, as Dr. Syurmelikhindi reminds us, although aqueducts were invented before the Romans, it was the Romans themselves who made them so complex and extensive thanks to their engineering skills. According to her, aqueducts became the most impressive engineering achievement of the Roman Empire. In fact, some ancient cities received more water than they do today, and more than 2,000 aqueducts of varying lengths have been preserved to date, not all of which have been discovered.