Sleeping Disorders And Aging

| Saturday, July 9, 2011
By Owen Jones


It is said that it is probable that most Americans and northern Europeans do not get enough sleep. A lack of sleep can lead to a shortage of concentration (which means being more accident prone); a weaker immune system (more illness) and depression. It is crucial to get enough quality sleep. We all require sufficient decent quality rest, sufficient good quality food and sufficient decent quality exercise.

Aging, or senescence, has its own peculiar effects on the body. In general, the body's capacity to carry out certain functions slows down - it takes it longer to do things or get over things.

Sleep can be one of the functions that suffers and we call it insomnia. It is very frequently said that old people need less sleep. This is not inevitably true, but what is the case is that they do often get less sleep.

Many people suffer from insomnia, not only older people. Worrying is a cause of sleeplessness; younger people tend to worry about financial issues, older folk tend to worry about health issues. Women tend to suffer from insomnia more often than men, perhaps they worry more.

Lack of sleep can cause high blood pressure, because the heart is supposed to be resting at night as well, that is it beats more slowly for around eight hours. High blood pressure brings more concerns. Regrettably, we tend to shrug off a bad night's sleep as if it were an incidence of bad luck. The truth is it can have much more serious consequences than you first think.

In fact heart disease can be caused by over sleeping as well as by under sleeping. One of the most common sleep disorders and also one of the most difficult to detect is sleep apnoea. Doctors cannot detect it without the patient going to sleep in hospital. Sufferers do not normally know that they have it.

The spouse is normally the first person to notice the difficulty: the partner wakes up spluttering with a gasp for air like a drowning man. The sufferer normally ceases breathing for between ten seconds and two minutes. It can get very frightening for the partner, but the sufferer rarely wakes up because of it. This can happen dozens of times a night.

If you experience difficulties getting to sleep for a protracted length of time, you should seek professional help, but here are a few pointers you can try out. Do not do anything after 7 PM to raise your metabolism or blood pressure, so no strenuous exercise and no high calorie foods (like chocolates). A warm drink of cacao or hot milk assists a great deal of people to get to sleep, but not if you have to get up often to go to the toilet.

A sherry or a whisky helps others. An alcoholic drink like this at night is not going to turn you into a gibbering alcoholic (some individuals talk such drivel), but it can make sleep reliant on a drink. If you can sleep easily after merely one drink, you will be alright, if you need a great deal more, then the cure is getting to be more of a problem than the illness.




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