Working After 50? You May Have 92% Chance Of This Sleep Disorder

When it comes to healthy living, people usually think about diet and exercise first. And those things are important, but they are nothing without good sleep.

See for example: These Top Few Things Make The Biggest Difference To Health

It’s also important to mention that, 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?

When you’re on the clock…

Researchers (Dr. Belinda Steffan et al.) combined 1,901 self-reported health and workplace surveys with over 5,258 days of smartwatch sleep and activity data, from workers aged 50–66 working across different sectors, in a year-long study.

Since the methodology was purely observational, there’s not a lot to say about that part, so we’ll take the liberty of diving straight into the main findings:

• Sleep problems were more prevalent than you might think: nearly 70% of participants had persistent, clinically significant sleep problems throughout the study, even though none had a sleep disorder diagnosis
• About that last thing, it gets worse: around 92% met the diagnostic criteria for a sleep disorder at least once during the year.
• Sleep quality mattered more than sleep length: most participants slept between 6.5 and 8 hours per night, but wearable devices showed that frequent awakenings and disrupted sleep—as opposed to simply getting too little sleep in total—were the main problem.
• Yes, nighttime awakenings were extremely common: smartwatch data showed that 90% of participants experienced ongoing sleep disturbances during the study.

This latter makes us think about: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration

There were also some secondary findings that are a little more nuanced than a generic plea to try to sleep better:

• Work stress was strongly linked to worse sleep: analysis identified workplace experiences as one of the strongest factors associated with both sleep disruption and overall well-being.
• Better work-life balance predicted better health: this one feels obvious but it’s good to have the data for it, and yes, participants who reported healthier work-life balance and greater job satisfaction consistently had higher wellbeing scores.
• Negative workplace emotions were associated with poorer wellbeing: this one sounds like a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily, but to make it clear, feeling gloomy, irritated, or tense at work was consistently linked to lower mental wellbeing.

So, that makes it wise to consider such factors as: What’s Really Keeping You Awake? The Brain’s Role in Sleepless Nights

To read this paper in full, enjoy: Interrelations of work with health and wellbeing on a 50+ year old workforce assessed using longitudinal self-reports and actigraphy

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?

Here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:

• Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics
• Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
• 10 Tips for Better Sleep: Starting In The Morning

…as well as pointers to other relevant articles.

And 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!