Why does sleeping too much make you limp?

It is recommended for adults aged 26 and over to sleep between 6 and 9 hours by night. When you sleep more, during a lie-in or a nap, fatigue and drowsiness are sometimes still present when you wake up. Sleep therefore has no not been repairable. This feeling of “brain fog” is called inertia. “There are several reasons that can explain the lack of shape when waking up after sleeping a lot” explains Dr Isabelle Poirot, psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders. Starting with our way of life.

Our sleep does not correspond to our physiological needs

Sleeping too much and not feeling good when you wake up is the result of something called insufficient sleep syndrome “During the whole week of workthe people concerned will have a amount of sleep that does not correspond to their physiological needs. The more they advance in the week, the more the fatigue intensifies.. They will also feel a great need to sleep when they should be taking a nap to recover.” At the end of the week, the weekend becomes a time to recover where the time of sleep is abnormally important with a late rise and/or nap. Despite this significant recovery time, the entire week’s sleep debt is not made up and sleep inertia occurs. “The brain will fight against sleep as long as it can.” In reality we slept at a time when we shouldn’t have. The health professional reminds us that we are also “animals that depend on the day/night alternation. We therefore have a privileged time to get up in the morning because our biological clocks are designed so that our entire body is wide awake after a certain time.” But this biological clock can only adapt after a few days and not when there is too big a difference between our weekday sunrises and our weekend sunrises.

A nap rather than a lie-in

To recover from this sleep debt “it is better to favor the nap to sleep in”, advises the specialist. Be careful, there is nevertheless two types of nap : there short nap lasting 20 to 30 minutes and the extended nap lasting from one hour to one and a half hours which equals one sleep cycle. The prolonged nap allows recovery but increases the risk of having recovered too much on the weekend, preventing fall asleep on Sunday evening. “A certain adaptation is possiblethe best thing is to try to respect your ideal sleep time and your wake-up requirements.” Finally, the problem of inertia is particularly characteristic of sleep teenagers : “They generally go to bed too late and their getting up is painful because their biological clock is still in the sleep phase while their brain is awake”, explains the psychiatrist “Teenagers can sleep in on the weekend but it should not be too prolonged so as not to delay their sleep. Getting up on Saturday and Sunday should not exceed three hours compared to the usual rising of the week.” If the teenager gets up at 7 a.m., he should not get up after 10 a.m. on weekends. Aside from disruptions linked to our lifestyle, a lack of form when we wake up “may be due to an underlying pathology such asSleep Apneathere depression or thehypersomnia (causing more than 11 hours of sleep per night)”, underlines our interlocutor. “Those are medical reasons which require discussion with a doctor.”

Thanks to Dr Isabelle Poirot, psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders