As people age, their sleep patterns change. This is not a revelation for you. Once, you could stay up till 2 a.m., sleep 12 hours, then do it over again. And feel great doing it. Now you go to bed at 10 p.m., turn turn turn, knuckle the pillow, wonder if the iPad will wake your partner, worry that the light from the iPad will make it harder to get back to sleep, go to the other room, wonder if a glass of wine will hurt or help, curse your insomnia because you have that thing tomorrow.
You know the drill.
Poor sleep is not inevitable as you age but it is more common. And for most people, the shape of the night changes—the hours, the pattern, the amount of deep REM sleep. Meanwhile, says the New York Times blog on Boomers, old folks find their “circadian rhythm is shifting ever earlier for reasons no one really understands.”
The main reasons for sleep problems won’t surprise you: pain, an increase in apnea that can come from being overweight or losing muscle tone. Also, there’s alcohol, which was a powerful sleep aid in your youth but which tends to be a sleep inhibitor as you age. And depression. which can be both a cause of insomnia and a result of insomnia.
The CDC has five tips for getting better sleep, one of which is that you shouldn’t read in bed, which means that some of us would quickly descend into illiteracy because there is no better place to read than in bed, with a glass of wine.
The CDC’s first tip seems like the best and the easiest: “Go to bed at the same time each night and rise at the same time each morning.” This is consistent with research that suggests a regular schedule might be one of the cheapest and most effective ways to improve your health. (Some of this is summarized in The End of Illness, by Dr. David Agus.)
The CDC also suggests that you make your bed comfortable.
Image: Statue of Sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican Museums, by Wknight94 via Wikimedia Commons.
