The belief that older people tend to suffer worse sleep may be false - in fact the reverse may be true, according to US researchers.
According to “Sleep quality 'improves with age'” of BBC news published on 1 March 2012, a telephone survey of more than 150,000 adults suggested that, apart from a blip in your 40s where sleep quality was poorer, sleep quality gets better with age. Those in their 80s reported the best sleep, says the study in Sleep journal. A UK sleep researcher said while poor health could affect sleep, it was a "myth" that age alone was a factor. While universities have equipment which can measure sleep duration and disturbance in study volunteers, this does not always match the volunteer's own opinion on their night's rest. The research, conducted by the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania, instead focused on asking large numbers of randomly selected people about their sleep. They were also asked about their race, income, education, mood and general health. While being depressed or having health problems was linked to poor sleep quality, once the researchers had adjusted the results to compensate for this, a distinct pattern emerged. Instead, they found that complaints about poor sleep quality fell as age rose, with the lowest number of complaints coming from the over-70s.
Although old people seem to have less sleep in term of hours, older people have better sleep than middle age and younger people. There are some factors which affect an improvement of sleep when age rise. First, when people are middle age, people work hard and need many hours of sleep to restore their energy for working on the next day that sometimes it is may be not enough for them. Most Teenagers also have bad quality of sleep since they have work really hard on studying, and nowadays in social network and technology era some teenagers keep play games and website until late night. For middle age and teenagers, even if they spend long time on sleep, they still feel tired that can be called bad quality of sleep. Most of old people do not have to work as much as middle age and teenager do. Some of them may already retire from their job. Even though they spend less time on their sleep, they still have the better quality of sleep than middle age. Another reason is very close to the first one. Because of hard working, Middle age and teenagers have more stress. Stress is not good for health both when you sleep and awake. Old people do not have to think a lot, so they have excellent sleep and very fresh waking up.
Quality of sleep does not depend on the hours of sleep. It depends more on people behaviors. In fact people who sleep in fewer hours could have better quality of sleep. Those are the reasons why behaviors of old people make them to have better quality of sleep.
References
Sleep quality 'improves with age'. (2012, March 1)BBC News. Retrieved 0:20, March 5, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17209448
I totally agree with you and you do this second story which is really hard work in my idea.
ReplyDeleteI observed new trend of elderly in my home town last 2 years. They said to me that they need to work. if they can go back to work like that, what should affect to their sleep quality?
In my hometown, Elderly people wake up very early for "Thai-kak" or chinese exercise and go to get a queue at hospital before all health staffs go to provide health service at our hospital. Moreover, some of them need amount of sleeping pills too.
As you mention that, the sleep quality is depend on behavior of each person and I think their opinion is the most crucial rule for this topic as well. What do you think?
I generally sleep well. My only problem is that I love to work late at night - I seem to be most alert and productive after about 11:00 PM. This was fine when I was at university, except for my mathematics lectures, which were often in the early morning, but it's not so good these days when I like to get up at 7:00 AM so that I can have a relaxed start to the day before I start teaching at 10:00 AM.
ReplyDeleteSaturdays and Sundays are the worst though: then I start at 8:00 AM. But thankfully, I can go home and have a nap afterwards. Afternoon naps also seem to work well for me.
I'm glad Ping chose this article to blog.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I like is that it reminds us that a lot of commonly held beliefs might in fact be myths: if the research has not been done and there is no solid evidence, a belief, however common and popular, might be completely wrong.
For example, a lot of people think that if the sale and use of an addictive drug, such as alcohol, is criminalised there will be a lot less people using that drug. The evidence says this belief is wrong, but I think it's still a popular and common myth. Does making drugs like alcohol illegal reduce their use in society?
What's your favourite untested belief people have that might be a myth?