How can adults ‘sleep wrong’ or ‘sleep too long’?
I’m not talking about oversleeping your alarm when I’m asking about sleeping too long; I mean when you slept long enough to wake up with a killer headache or your eyes wanting to pop out of your head, or when you end up sleeping in the wrong position somehow and now your leg and hip hurts.
When I was a kid I was always flabbergasted how the adults in my life could mess up when it came to sleeping. Now that I am an adult who fucks up sleeping sometimes I have to know.
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Well, for me anyway it’s getting old that does it. All the aches and pains, and especially old injuries. Sleep on my shoulder at the wrong angle and an old injury flares up.
My usual method is accidentally taking off my CPAP mask while I sleep.
So sleeping in the wrong position basically boils down to “I slept in a way that somehow put pressure on a nerve or pinched a nerve and now the associated muscles are tight/sore/achy.” That’s really it. Like for your legs it could be your sciatic nerve that runs down through your hip to your whole leg. Meaning sleeping in a weird way can affect the whole leg.
Well it has a lot of reasons…
Sleeping “wrong” happens when your spine/neck gets twisted in a weird position (like fetal on a couch), muscles stiffen unevenly, or nerves get pinched. Pillow height, mattress firmness, or sudden weird sprawls mid-sleep can wreck you.
Sleeping “too long” (even if “enough”) can dehydrate you, drop blood sugar, or cause rebound headaches from overshooting sleep cycles (waking mid-deep sleep). Also, lying still too long stiffens joints and pools inflammatory gunk in muscles—hence the “why does my hip feel broken?” vibe.
Aging + stress = less adaptable tissues. Congrats, you’ve unlocked a bad things called “adulthood”
Sometimes you’ve slept in the wrong position and your joints/tendons/cartilage aren’t as young as they used to be + your adult body weighs more, so you’re more impacted if you stay in the wrong position for hours at a time.
If you sleep too long, this can probably also cause mild dehydration/electrolyte/hormonal/blood sugar issues which can contribute to headaches.
In general the older people get the less flexible their body gets. People are heavy. When you sleep you roll over on yourself including your limbs or your back gets put in a different than normal position. When people start “stretching” like this, it puts pressure on their joints and ligaments. When we wake up after this, we have been in the “stretched” position far too long leading to soreness. As far as the other stuff, pillow too hard, pillow too soft, not enough water, too much water, etc. ,
Regarding the headache and eyes, this is more likely to be dehydration. Drink some water when you wake up.
Sore eyes when you wake up is pretty common. Your eyes get oxygen through the air, not blood vessels, so when you sleep, they getting less and you can wake up with bloodshot or painful eyes. This is even more likely if you use eye drops / false tears. When your eyes are dehydrated, this makes it even harder for them to absorb oxygen, reading to redness and pain.