As you may painfully know: Sleep gets more difficult the older you get. Older adults are less able, on average, to obtain as much sleep, or as restorative a sleep, as young adults. The problem gets so bad that by our 80s, the lack of sleep can have major health ramifications, though we don’t always notice.
Older adults face a number of challenges. The first is a reduction in the quantity and quality of deep sleep—the stage that beneficially overhauls your cardiovascular, immune and metabolic systems and refreshes learning and memory abilities. As you enter your 30s and 40s, your deep-sleep brain waves become smaller, less powerful and fewer in number. Reductions in deep-sleep quality increase your risk of heart attacks, obesity and stroke, as well as the buildup of a toxic brain protein—called beta amyloid—that is linkedto Alzheimer’s disease.
Read more from The Wall Street Journal | October 13th, 2017: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-older-you-are-the-worse-you-sleep-15079...