Sleep eludes so many adults — over a third aren't getting enough, but we don’t often talk about their counterparts who sleep too much.
Sleeping too much might sound like a good problem to have, but in reality, it belies a serious health problem. Dr. Fahmi Farah and our team at Bentley Heart in Fort Worth, Texas, dive into the connection between sleep health and your cardiovascular system.
Healthy adults should get 7-9 hours of sleep every night. You’re oversleeping if you get more than nine hours of sleep regularly.
Heart issues and sleep disturbances can have a bidirectional relationship.
On the one hand, narcolepsy, a chronic disorder that affects your ability to control sleep-wake cycles and contributes to excessive daytime sleepiness, can impact your heart health. Any time you fall asleep, your blood pressure naturally drops below normal. But when you have narcolepsy, that doesn’t always happen, and researchers believe it can negatively affect your cardiovascular system.
On the other hand, fatigue and daytime sleepiness can be symptoms of cardiovascular disease, especially in conditions like heart failure and cardiomyopathy, where the heart fails to pump blood efficiently. In addition to extreme fatigue, you might feel dizzy and exhausted when you wake up, unable to do everyday activities, and/or experience sudden and severe weakness.
Either way, fatigue, daytime sleepiness, and oversleeping are never something to ignore.
The opposite is also true: Sleep disorders that keep you from sleeping can also impact your heart health. The two most common are sleep apnea and insomnia.
If you’re struggling with sleep (either too much or too little) and worry about how it’s affecting your heart health, you’re in the right place.
At Bentley Hart, we offer a wide range of services that address heart health problems and sleep disruptions.
We may recommend undergoing sleep testing to understand why you’re struggling with daytime sleepiness. You had to undergo sleep testing in a lab in the past, but now you can do it from the comfort of your own bed with an at-home sleep test.
We also offer extensive cardiovascular testing, including EKG, stress testing, echocardiography, and cardiac monitoring.
If we uncover a sleep disruption, we help you take the necessary steps toward resolving it. For instance, narcolepsy responds well to:
If your heart problem is causing your fatigue, we can discuss certain treatments, including lifestyle changes, medications, supplements, supervised exercise programs, and/or heart surgery.
Ready to get the right kind of rest and safeguard your heart health? We’d love to talk with you. Call our friendly staff at 817-720-5185 or use our online booking tool to schedule a consultation today.