Feeling sleepy can make you feel 10 years older. Researchers at Stockholm University found that the sleep affects age. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Sleep disorders
Do you ever long for the energy and vitality of your youth? Feeling young is not just a matter of perception, but is actually related to objective health outcomes. Previous studies have shown that feeling younger than your actual age is associated with a longer, healthier life. There is also support for subjective age to predict actual brain age, with those who feel younger having younger brains.
“Given that sleep is essential for brain function and general well-being, we decided to test whether sleeping at night holds any secrets to preserving a youthful sense of age,” says Leonie Balter, researcher at the University's Department of Psychology. of Stockholm.
In the first study, 429 people aged 18 to 70 were asked how old they felt, how many days in the past month they hadn't gotten enough sleep, and how sleepy they were. It turned out that for every night of insufficient night's rest in the past month, participants felt on average 0.23 years older.
In a second study, researchers tested whether it was actually a lack of sleep that made participants feel older. Therefore, they conducted an experimental study on sleep restriction involving 186 participants between the ages of 18 and 46. Participants limited their night's rest for two nights – just four hours in bed each night – and another time got enough sleep for two nights, with nine hours in bed each night.
After the night's sleep restriction, participants felt on average 4.4 years older than if they had gotten enough sleep. The effects of sleep on subjective age appeared to be related to feelings of sleepiness. Feeling extremely alert was related to feeling 4 years younger than one's actual age, while extreme sleepiness was related to feeling 6 years older than one's actual age.
“This means that going from alert to sleepy added a full 10 years to your age,” says Leonie Balter, and says the implications for our daily lives are clear:
“Safeguarding our night's sleep is essential to maintaining a youthful feeling. This, in turn, can promote a more active lifestyle and encourage health-promoting behaviors, as both feeling young and alert are important to our motivation to be active.”
Establish regular, healthy sleep patterns
Getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night is currently out of reach for almost a third of the population, as experts at Flinders University found that 31 per cent of adults have an average night's sleep duration outside the recommended range.
The global study of thousands of adults published in Sleep Health found that only 15% of people got the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep five or more nights a week, and among those who got an average of seven to nine hours of sleep a night over the nine nights, month of monitoring, approximately 40% of the nights were outside the ideal range. The article is titled “Are we getting enough sleep? Irregular and frequent night's sleep found in an analysis of over 11 million nights of objective home sleep data.”
“This is crucial because regularly not getting enough, or perhaps too much, sleep is associated with negative effects and we are only now realizing the consequences of irregular night's rest,” says researcher Dr Hannah Scott of Flinders University.
“Clearly and frequently achieving the recommended sleep duration range is a challenge for many people, especially during the work week.”
The Flinders research team used sleep monitoring data collected from an under-mattress sensor to examine sleep duration over a nine-month period in nearly 68,000 adults around the world. The sample consisted of 67,254 adults (52,523 males, 14,731 females), primarily in Europe and North America, whose sleep recordings were recorded by the Withings under-mattress sleep analyzer.
Sleeping less than six hours on average per night is associated with an increased risk of mortality and multiple health conditions including hypertension, obesity and heart disease. Less than seven hours and more than nine hours of sleep per day have been linked to health and well-being problems, including digestive and neurobehavioral deficits.
Female participants generally had longer sleep durations than males, and middle-aged people had shorter sleep durations than younger or older participants.
“Based on these findings, public health and advocacy efforts must support communities and individuals to achieve more regular sleep within the recommended range for their age,” says co-author Professor Danny Eckert, from the National Health and Australian Medical Research Council (NHMRC). ) executive and director of sleep health research at Flinders University.
“Given what we know about the importance of sleep for health, we must also help people resolve chronic sleep problems and encourage all people to make sleep a priority.”
Regular snoring is also associated with high blood pressure, according to another new study from Flinders University.
Tips from Flinders sleep researchers for achieving a better sleep regime include:
In the short term, people are advised to try to maintain a sufficient sleep schedule to feel sufficiently rested, as often as possible. Maintaining a set wake-up time, even on weekends, and going to bed when you feel sleepy will help ensure you get sufficient and frequent restful sleep.
If people are unable to maintain a consistent sleep schedule due to unavoidable commitments (e.g. shift work), catching up on sleep is recommended.
Pay attention to symptoms of insufficient sleep, such as daytime drowsiness, fatigue, difficulty maintaining concentration, poor memory and possible errors while driving. This may be due to not getting enough sleep or that the sleep is not sufficiently restorative due to poor sleep quality, as happens for example in obstructive sleep apnea.
People who feel like they aren't getting enough sleep, especially those who currently sleep less than seven hours, could test whether allowing a longer sleep schedule or naps helps them sleep longer and makes them feel more rested.
For those who do not suffer from sleep disorders, following good sleep hygiene can be helpful. Avoiding caffeine and alcohol in the afternoon/reducing caffeine and alcohol consumption during the day and/or avoiding a heavy meal before bed can help people fall asleep faster and sleep longer.
Others may not benefit much from following sleep hygiene advice, but it's worth a try because it could be a relatively simple solution to their sleep problems.
People should consult their GP in the first instance if they are concerned about their sleep. Treatment options are available through referral to sleep specialists for a variety of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and insomnia.
A drink before bed can cause reductions in REM sleep
A team of neuroscientists and sleep researchers at the EP Bradley Hospital Sleep Research Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues at Brown University and the Providence VA Medical Center, found that instead of improving sleep, consuming an alcoholic beverage before bed can cause a reduction in REM sleep. The team describes their sleep experiments in the journal Sleep.
Previous research has shown that REM sleep takes up about 20% of a typical night's rest, but it's still important. Although scientists still don't understand the purpose of REM sleep, they know that people who don't get enough of it can experience emotional problems, mental acuity difficulties, and memory problems.
In this study, researchers explored whether consuming alcohol before bed could have a positive or negative impact on the quality of night's rest and in particular on REM sleep. To find out, they recruited 30 adult volunteers who spent three consecutive days and nights on two occasions in a dedicated laboratory, where their brains could be monitored while they slept.
To evaluate the impact of drinking a nightcap before bed, the researchers served only a mixer (non-alcoholic ingredients typically used to make cocktails) during one of their stays and a mixer with added alcohol in the other. Both times the drink was consumed an hour before the volunteer went to bed.
The research team found that drinking just one alcoholic drink led to an increase in slow-wave sleep on all three nights. It also shortened the duration of REM sleep. Overall, they found that volunteers were able to fall asleep faster after consuming alcohol, but their quality of night's sleep suffered due to shorter REM periods.
They also noticed that drinking an alcoholic beverage on consecutive nights did not change how much REM sleep was affected: their body did not adapt to overcome the effects of alcohol. The team concludes that drinking even a small amount of alcohol before going to bed can negatively affect the quality of your night's sleep.
Poor sleep could lead to heavier drinking in younger people
A reduced night's sleep may increase the risk of heavier drinking among young adults, according to a new Yale study that evaluated reciprocal changes in good sleep and drinking over time in young adults.
The study, led by Lisa Fucito, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, found that young adults consumed more alcohol after nights of less sleep and had more delayed times after heavier drinking occasions.
Previous research has demonstrated important associations between sleep and alcohol among older adults with a history of chronic alcohol use disorders. This is the first study to identify a potential bidirectional association between sleep problems and excessive alcohol use in young adults at risk for alcohol use disorder.
In the study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 42 young adults who reported excessive alcohol use in the past month tracked their nightly sleep and alcohol consumption every day for a week.
Participants wore a validated ambulatory sleep-wake activity monitor (e.g., Philips Respironics Actiwatch) and completed daily web-based diaries that included questions about alcohol consumption.
Sleeping less and waking up earlier, but feeling well-rested, predicts greater subsequent alcohol use, according to the study, funded by the Yale Center for Acute and Chronic Sleep Disorders, sponsored by the NINR. Higher alcohol consumption predicted later going to bed and waking up compared to occasions of moderate or no drinking.
“These preliminary findings support further investigation of sleep as a pathway to alcohol risk in young adults and the potential for improved sleep to reduce this risk,” the authors wrote.
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