The ideal amount of sleep varies from person to person, but experts recommend, on average, at least seven hours per night. Getting six hours of sleep is still considered reasonable, but below that the health risks increase significantly. The topic was discussed by Dr. Roberto Kalil and sleep medicine experts on CNN Vital Signs this Saturday (2).
During the program, pulmonologist Geraldo Lorenzi-Filho, director of the InCor Sleep Laboratory, highlighted that people who sleep little are at greater risk of developing hypertension and obesity. Excessive sleep also represents a warning.
“Oversleeping is more or less when you eat too much, it’s overcooked”, explained Geraldo. According to him, The body has three to five sleep cycles, and exceeding them can generate a type of inertia, leaving the person slower and more tired when waking up.
Cardiologist Luciano Drager, from the InCor Hypertension Unit, added that excessive sleeping may be a silent marker of underlying illnesses. “Sleeping too much can be a silent marker of some underlying illness,” he said.
He cited disorders such as depression, anxiety and himself as possible causes. Science, according to the cardiologist, still does not fully understand the mechanism, but the two extremes — sleeping too little and sleeping too much — are associated with greater cardiovascular risk.
One of the questions raised during the program was about people who sleep deeply, dream a lot, but . For Geraldo Lorenzi-Filho, this situation is not normal.
“If you wake up tired, something is wrong,” said the pulmonologist. He highlighted the importance of investigating the patient’s complete routine and evaluating conditions such as sleep apnea, which may be fragmenting the night’s rest without the person realizing it.
Is compensating for sleep on the weekend worth it?
The practice of sleeping little during the week and trying to catch up on the weekend was also discussed. Luciano Drager presented data from a study carried out with more than a thousand people, within the scope of the ELSA Brasil project (Longitudinal Study of Adult Health).
The research evaluated participants’ coronary tomography and repeated the exam five years later, objectively measuring sleep duration with a wristwatch. The results indicated that people who slept little during the week, but extended sleep on the weekend, had a lower incidence of fatty plaque in their arteries over five years.
“The people who compensated, at the end of five years, the incidence of that fatty plaque was lower in the person who extended their sleep”, concluded the cardiologist.
