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  4. Do you see potential HPA pathology with clients who decide to go back to sleep or hit the snooze button after their initial morning awakening?
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  4. Do you see potential HPA pathology with clients who decide to go back to sleep or hit the snooze button after their initial morning awakening?

Do you see potential HPA pathology with clients who decide to go back to sleep or hit the snooze button after their initial morning awakening?

Chris Kresser: That’s an interesting question. What we do see is a U-shaped curve in terms of sleep duration. We see people who don’t get enough sleep. That’s associated with more disease risk. And we see people who get too much sleep is associated with more disease risk. I’ve always wondered about the causality in the second scenario. We know that a lot of diseases will make people tired, and it’s very possible that having the disease is what’s making the person sleep more instead of sleeping more leading to more disease. But there’s at least some research that controlled for that and did still find that people who slept more—more than nine hours, I think, or nine-and-a-half hours—were at higher risk of disease. I don’t know. It really depends. Are they hitting the snooze button because they were up using their iPad or computer until 1 a.m. and their alarm is going off at 6 a.m.? In that case, I think they’re just tired and they need to be getting more sleep. But if they go to bed at 9 and wake up at 7 and they’re still hitting the snooze button, then that’s probably a bigger sign of a problem.

 

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