What Age Is Your Sleep?

We’ve written before about the topic of age and sleep, and most notably, how (contrary to popular belief) we don’t need less sleep in older age: Why You Probably Need More Sleep ← a lot of people mistake getting 6 hours sleep per night for only needing 6 hours sleep per night.

Sure, you may still be alive after regularly getting 6 hours, but (unless you have a rare mutation of the ADRB1 gene) it will be causing harm, and yes, that includes later in life; we don’t stop needing so much sleep, even if we stop getting it.

It’s also noteworthy that sleep-deprived people usually underestimate how sleep-deprived they are. This is for the same reason as why drunk people usually underestimate how drunk they are—to put it in words that go for both situations: a cognitively impaired person lacks the cognitive function to realize how cognitively impaired they are. Here’s the science on that: How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?

But today, it’s about a different aspect of age that has a different effect on sleep:

How old do you feel?

Researchers (Dr. Julia Boyle et al.) surveyed 3,177 adults with a mean average age of 42.8 years, of whom 49% were women, and examined how the gap between how old people feel (subjective age) and how old they actually are (chronological age) was related to sleep and health outcomes.

What they found, in few words: those who felt older than their chronological age reported more insomnia symptoms, greater sleep-related daytime impairment, poorer overall sleep health, and less regular sleep patterns.

Now, you may be thinking “well, that tracks; someone with a bunch of adverse health conditions is going to feel older and sleep worse, so what’s the news here?” and that’d be valid in a vacuum, but as it turns out, the aforementioned associations remained significant even after accounting for chronological age, sex, race, depression, and anxiety, meaning that the subjective age itself appears to have a direct relationship with the worse sleep outcomes.

Notably, feeling older was also associated with poorer self-rated physical health, and the correlational and regressional analyses suggested that this relationship was partly explained by the worse sleep, particularly greater insomnia severity, poorer sleep regularity, and more daytime impairment.

Dr. Boyle and her team conclude:

❝Results suggest that the age you feel, not just the age you are, shapes sleep and health. Feeling older than your years predicts more insomnia, poorer sleep regularity, and greater sleep-related impairment, with downstream effects on physical health. These results reinforce the need to challenge negative perceptions of aging, not only in clinical care but also through education and public health messaging. Put simply, how old you feel is an important predictor of sleep and health across the lifespan.❞

You can read the paper in full, here: Feeling Older Than You Are: Links Between Subjective Age and Sleep Outcomes ← to see the whole paper rather than just the abstract, you’ll need to click on “PDF”

But watch out! Because of: How Anxiety About Aging Accelerates Aging

And to understand the relationships between the different kinds of aging, see: Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

Want to boost your sleep?

Some sleep aids can help, but many are harmful and/or do not really work as such; here’s a rundown of examples of those: Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors?

And when it comes to napping, timing is everything: How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)

Want to learn more?

For a much more in-depth treatment of the topic, you might like this book that we reviewed a while back:

Why We Sleep – by Dr Matthew Walker

Basically, if you will read only one book on sleep, that’s the book.

Sweet dreams!