The Connection Between Sleep & Aging

Hi, everyone, it's Kessonga. As you know, this week is hosted by the incredible sleep expert, Dr. Aric Prather. And just to remind you, you can get his entire sleep course, Finding Your Best Sleep, on the Headspace app right now. Headspace Studios. (light ethereal music) (soft music) Hi, everyone, it's Dr. Aric Prather, your resident sleep psychologist here. I'm really excited because today I'm gonna discuss something that affects all of us but is rarely talked about, sleep and aging. We might avoid this topic because aging is such a scary subject in our culture, but it's going to happen to all of us, if we're lucky, and sleep is a huge part of how we feel, our health, and our overall quality of life as we get older. So if we know more about it, we can develop tools to sleep well now and in the future. Today, I'll break down how our sleep patterns change as we age and what we can do to have consistent sleep as our bodies naturally evolve. So let's dive in. My sleep is certainly not as robust as it was 20 years ago or even 15 years ago. Some of that can be attributed to age, but, you know, honestly like a lot of things change within the life-course that also contribute to your sleep. In my late 20's, early 30's, I didn't have children. I had a different set of responsibilities. But also there's age-related change that we do see in the amount of deep sleep that we get, and how consolidated our sleep is also changes. And I see this a lot in patients. Say, an older adult in his mid to late 60's is really concerned about the fact that he's waking up throughout the night. Some of it is to use the bathroom, some of it is active thinking, but when we actually look at his sleep diary to see how much sleep he's getting, it just is a little bit more fragmented, but the actual duration is not so bad, that it is close to the seven hours. But he's thinking about, "Well, when I was 40 or when I was 30, "I would sleep like a log. "I would just go to sleep, stay asleep, no problem." And so sometimes it's helpful to show people how sleep changes over time. It's also possible that older adults need less sleep, and that's actually for open discussion. We don't really know exactly whether it's part of the natural life-course of how our brain functions in producing less sleep. If we got older adults more sleep, would that be helpful? There's also the consideration that in many cultures there's retirement, there's more opportunities for napping during the day, we're less physically active, and all of those things can contribute to the structure of our sleep. The other thing that's notable is that we see this decrease in slow-wave sleep as we age. Slow-wave sleep is this restorative sleep....