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Do you remember how you slept last night? If you are over 50, chances are overwhelming, that half the time, you don't get the kind of chance at a good night's shuteye that you did when you were younger. Your entire well-being depends on the way your brain can relax well enough to slide into worry-free sleep day in and day out. Forget nutrition, or great supplements; if you can get a good nights sleep, there is nothing quite like it for the way you age. Especially when you are over 60. And this is the time, sadly, that sleeping difficulty sets in.

So what is it that goes on in the brain, that it so reliably loses its ability to put you to sleep as it ages? The thing is, just as your body changes as it ages, becoming looser, less able to tolerate disease or recovering after a hard day's work, so does the brain change for the worse. Expecting to sink into a blackhole of sound sleep at 60, just doesn't take into account some fundamental rules of basic physiology. At 20, you can take no more than two minutes to fall sleep when you hit the pillow. 30 years later, it can take up to a half hour. Scientists don't really know what exactly happens; but age changes the way you sleep, in a very striking and recognizable pattern.

As we age, a good way of battling sleeping difficulty would be to go back to the simple way our lives were when we were growing up. And that means, not really having the computer or television turned on in the time leading up to bed time. We need to just establish a simple reassuring pattern of activities right before bedtime - a ritual if you will. A good way would be to drop everything at a given exact hour, and go pamper yourself with a little cream rub-in, a little warm milk, and a little gentle music while you turn off almost all the lights, to help the body slow down. People who do this, according to a study, take a half hour less to fall sleep, and they stay asleep a hour longer. And if you take in a good deal of regular exercise, extended running or walking for instance, you can count on the same kind of sleeping benefits, just as long as you don't do it up to six hours before bedtime.

But what if sleeping difficulty comes to you when you're young? That's the age when we get knocked out at the dinner table if we so choose. Who doesn't have an entertaining story of how completely sleepy they were they couldn't tell where they were or what they were doing? Even with such wonderful sleeping capital biology gives us it is possible to ruin with modern lifestyles. Too much time spent at the computer just hops our brains up, and makes it very difficult to get to sleep. Things have just become more difficult now that online gaming is all the rage. If you have a friend in China whom you feel is your sworn computer gaming enemy to beat, it can be very difficult for both of you, to sleep when you know that there is an online game to play. In the gaming world where they sell gaming gear that is often three times as expensive for sub-millisecond improvements in response time all to "help you shoot the enemy before he can respond", it is a wonder that young people don't see how sleep deprivation compromises their abilities. Sleep problems at this stage can lead to sleep problems that are harder to treat at a later age too. A great way to come to grips with the situation would be to visit a sleep clinic. The doctor will probably be able to give you lots of little insights; one of which will be that sleeping in a room you have your gaming setup stacked up in, can be quite harmful to your sleep. Blinking LEDs are very bad for your sleep.

Just remember, sleeping fewer than seven hours a day, puts you at three times the risk of catching opportunistic infections like a viral fever or cold. Not to mention weight gain. If you sleep fewer than six hours a day, you may think you're working just fine, but yourability to think on your feet is greatly compromised. Sleep fewer than five hours a day, you put yourself on the fast-track to diabetes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 5:15 am and is filed under current health related articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.