At the moment I’m reading one of the trashiest, most absolutely silly novels in existence (the name will be omitted to protect the not-so-innocent ). Right now, one of the characters is sleeping eleven to twelve hours a night, and I can just feel it in my bones that he’s about to be diagnosed with some Life-Threatening Illness, based solely on the fact of his sleep habits. I’ve seen this plot device used not-infrequently in books, film, and television, and I guess I’m wondering:
Dopers who are medical folk, if you had a patient in for a checkup and one of you brought up sleep habits and your patient mentioned he reguarly slept eleven to twelve hours a night, would you automatically consider this a cause for a alarm and order a barrage of tests? Really? I have a feeling the answer is yes, but it seems vaguely improbable to me…
And yes, I do realize that there are different degrees of normalcy, and that surely there must be perfectly healthy folks who sleep less than the average and those who sleep more.
Everyone’s sleep cycle is a little differnt. The old saw of 8 hour a night just doesn’t fit everyone. Sleep studies have shown that most folks sleep in 1.5-3 hour cycles, The period where you’re balanced between waking and sleeping is the alpha period, (because you have Alpha waves on an EEG) then deep sleep in 4 stages, then REM, then back up to alpha, then back down.
If by chance, you miss the end of a cycle, chances are you’ll stay asleep another 3 hours.
So, easily one could sleep 12 hours a night and be perfectly normal.
That said, when one’s sleep habits change, it can be a sign of illness or depression.
I have slept that long for long periods when I didn’t have many commitments. I had surgery for sleep apnea and I thought that would alter the desire for so much sleep but it really didn’t. An issue for me is that I am always exhausted in the mornings no matter how much sleep I got. Left to my own devices, I will always sleep though the morning until 11 or noon. That can easily be a 12+ hour sleep.
I don’t know if I’m unusual or not, but the longer I sleep, the worse I feel when I wake up. I normally get 5-6 hours per night. If I sleep for 8+ hours, I wake up with a mild headache that will get worse if I don’t eat soon (so the headache may simply be tied to morning hunger, which is less of a factor if I don’t sleep so long). With 8+ hours of sleep, it takes me a couple of hours to really get moving after I wake up. By contrast, after 5-6 hours I can pop out of bed and get right to business, feeling refreshed and ready to go.
If it were really that big of a deal, you’d think they’d put a question on the doctor’s intake questionnaire about how many hours you sleep. They already give me the opportunity to exaggerate how often I exercise
I have a very odd bell curve for sleep-happiness. I can get up to 4 hours of sleep, wake up, be functional – My normal happy goofy self. 6 - 9 hours produces alternately a grumpy, mean, irritable, half-conscious Whifton. 10 - 12 and I’m back to what passes for normal in these parts. Any thing beyond that, I wake up, look at the clock, and can only assume I must have been to a raging kegger and feel pretty good about that, and go about whatever parts of my daily routine I can squeeze in.
So, basically, what passes for a “normal” night’s sleep, i.e. 8 hours give or take, results in me at my worst. This confuses the daylights out of one of my friends, who insists that you should NEVER get more OR less than EXACTLY 8 hours of sleep a night. But then, he also rebuilds washing machine motors for fun, so go fig.
). Right now, one of the characters is sleeping eleven to twelve hours a night, and I can just feel it in my bones that he’s about to be diagnosed with some Life-Threatening Illness, based solely on the fact of his sleep habits. I’ve seen this plot device used not-infrequently in books, film, and television, and I guess I’m wondering: