Age is the ultimate cause of sleeplessness
Sleeping is the best aid to every stress. Teenagers have the opportunity to slip into the bed at any hour of the day. Sleeping becomes hard as we head towards old age. You keep tossing and turning in search of sleep. With age, people need to have proper sleep to avoid health problems.
“Nearly every disease killing us in later life has a causal link to lack of sleep,” says Matthew Walker, professor of psychology and neuroscience and is a lead author working on a deep sleep study, He also said “We’ve done a good job of extending life span, but a poor job of extending our health span. We now see sleep, and improving sleep, as a new pathway for helping remedy that.”
Decreased sleep are in a way connected to many health problems like heart attacks, diabetes, obesity and stroke. Older people are not aware of the mental disorder which is an outcome of sleeplessness or poor sleep.
“The parts of the brain deteriorating earliest are the same regions that give us deep sleep,” said lead author Mander, a postdoctoral researcher. Our mental state is somewhere connected to our sleep and therefore improper sleep cycle effects our brain and other activities. The shift from sound sleep during our youth to not satisfying sleep mostly starts during the early 30’s and also causes physical ailments during the middle age.
Taking pills is not a solution to this problem. A number of the pharmaceutical industry are taking steps to cater insomnia. People are not aware of the fact that these pills which are designed to help them dose off are actually a bad substitute for the sleep cycle which is needed by the brain to function properly.
“The parts of the brain deteriorating earliest are the same regions that give us deep sleep,” said article lead author Mander, a postdoctoral researcher in Walker’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at UC Berkeley.
During the old age there comes a decline in non-rapid eye movement as well as the brain waves which are associated with it. This youthful wavesand the spindles helps in transferring information from the hippocampus, which supports brain’s short-term storage to the prefrontal cortex which helps consolidate the information which is considered as brain’s long-term storage. “Sadly, both these types of sleep brain waves diminish markedly as we grow old, and we are now discovering that this sleep decline is related to memory decline in later life,” said Winer, a doctoral student in Walker’s lab.
It has also been acknowledged that these sleeping pills should not be treated as the first-line response to sleep disorders. Sleeping pills are known for sedating the brain so, we must look up for some better treatments to restore proper and healthy sleep in aged people.
