This seems to be common to everyone I talk with. Too much sleep causes headaches. Whether it is sleeping in late or just cat napping for longer than an hour. Does anyone one know the physiological reason behind this?
Jim
I don’t care what the study that Cecil cited states, when I get too much sleep, I get a headache. Everyone I speak with says the same thing.
Boy, what a stupid non-answer from Cecil! I was actually considering asking this yesterday after I slept about 12 hours and felt like I had been run over by a truck for the rest of the day - killer headache that advil wouldn’t kill, body aches, and (worst of all) grogginess and sleepiness all day.
It’s because of Sleep Stages that we all have.
Basically, you do not sleep the same all the time. There are different classifications, but most people agree that there are either 4 or 5 stages of sleep. The deeper stages are NON-REM, deep sleep where the body recovers. You cycle between stages, as this graph shows.
Looking at the graph you can see that you initially drop down into the deepest stage of sleep. But this does not happen right away - you step down through the stages of sleep until you reach the deepest stage. This is VERY important if you are going to take a nap. In this case, you do NOT want to enter the deep sleep stages (the red areas on the graph). How long it takes to reach deep sleep varies by individual, but a safe rule of thumb is 20 minutes: if you sleep less than 20 minutes, you will not be awakened from deep sleep.
Being awakened from a deep sleep stage is what causes you to feel like crap. Your body thought that it had enough time to enter the serious recuperative stage of sleep, and now you are forcing it awake. Ouch.
A better plan: if you plan to nap, set an alarm for twenty minutes after you lay down. That way you will not enter deep sleep, and you will actually feel refreshed after your nap. Adjust this time as necessary: I know people who can sleep for 40 minutes and wake up refreshed; YMMV.
As for oversleeping, it’s essentially the same thing. Your body completes the normal sleep cycle (with lots of light, REM-sleep at the end), and you do not wake up. Eventually your body decides to enter another sleep cycle, and then you wake it up during a deep sleep stage. Again, ouch. Waking up from a deep-sleep stage makes you feel horrible.
That’s it in a nutshell. Why do I know all this? Because I’ve flown airplanes all around the world for 15 years, and fatigue studies are part of the deal. Short, monitored naps are actually encouraged on long flights to helps pilots maintain their alertness.
Hope this helps.
I don’t buy this explanation. In any case where I’ve had the “oversleeping blahs”, I’ve awoken naturally after about 12 hours of sleep without the aid of any form of alarm or external stimulus. This happened just yesterday, when I decided to “sleep until I woke up.” I awoke out of a very light sleep, with no external stimulus, and still felt like baked shit for the rest of the day.
Well, the only thing I can say is that maybe you aren’t getting “good” sleep when you are sleeping.
I am not a doctor or sleep analyst; I was jsut posting info that has been helpful for many of my pilot friends when planning naps/rest periods. Obviously every person is different, and one explanation cannot cover every person’s individual circumstances.
I’ve never had an ‘oversleeping blah’ like Freejooky’s and I sleep until I wake up whenever I can (I don’t know how you people can get up to an alarm every day. Must be a student thing, I guess). I find that the more time I spend dozing after I wake up the first time, the longer it takes me to wake up fully. For instance, I can be up and out in ten to fifteen minutes if I get up when I wake up. Dozing for a further two hours results in me wandering vacantly around the house for an hour, trying to remember what to do next. No headaches though, and I’ll come awake if necessary.
My worst zombie states come when the alarm has dragged me out of deep sleep and I have to get up. Even then I don’t get a headache, but I do frequently spend the next five minutes sliding drunkenly along the walls.
Really? It takes a lot to rouse somebody in deep sleep-- I don’t see how the body would be able to wake itself up without external stimuli.
Way back in the bad old days I used to work as a night guard - had to do a round every 2 hours through a 13 hour night shift, then head off to my day job. So, I’d finish my first round, set the alarm clock for 1 min before the next round, sleep for 1-1.5 hrs get slapped awake by the alarm, put my call in, do my round, reset the alarm clock, rinse and repeat. All night.
The 1.5 hr sleep cycle seemed to work best for me, with shorter periods leaving me in various altered states, pleasant and unpleasant.
However, I don’t remember ever getting headaches from this. Since interrupted sleep cycles don’t give me headaches, but ‘oversleeping’ does, maybe it has more to do with time spent lying down than time spent actually sleeping ?
This may be an unrelated issue, but when I wake up with a headache, it seems to be related to muscle pain coming from my neck from having slept in a bad position. Maybe posture might be a contributing factor?
Robin
Dehydration. You spend 12 hours straight, no food, no water, breathing heavily (snoring, perhaps) through your mouth, with no break, you’re gonna lose some fluid. Lack of hydration causes a lot of the symptoms you mention.
Do you drink coffee or another caffeinated beverage in the morning? Then when you oversleep, your bod doesn’t get its AM caffeine injection, which can lead to a headache.
A friend of mine said she once read an article (how’s THAT for a cite?) that many people’s “hangover” symptoms are caused by, or excacerbated by, the fact that after they go out and party, they sleep late, and don’t have their usual 6:30 AM (or whatever) cup of joe.
I think the headache is due to the settling of head boogers when you don’t move around much. This causes pressure in your sinuses and general skullbound vicinity. Once you wake up and things start flowing again, your headache would probably subside.
BINGO!?! If that isn’t the answer then we need to change biology and make it so.
I don’t think it’s dehydration. You could survive a week without any water if you didn’t move much the entire time. As far as I know, pilot141 is correct. Excess sleep has effects similar to insomnia.
I will try to find a recent cite if I can, but I remember seeing a fact on TV when I was younger. Headaches upon awakening could be the result of not getting enough oxygen from blocking your air intake with blankets / pillows or whatever for an extended period of time. Maybe when you sleep late, you try to cover your eyes from the light and in doing so block your air intake to some degree and cause the headaches that way?
Ok, so sleep apnea is known to cause all the symptoms you describe. (See here) Maybe you only have a mild case of sleep apnea (or it is situationally introduced as I mentioned in my previous post by blankets or whatever), so you only get the headaches when you sleep longer - so nights when you sleep a normal amount, you aren’t losing enough oxygen to feel the headaches, but stretching the amount of time you sleep increases the time you are low on oxygen and then that makes you feel the effects?