Does Sleep Change With Age? By W.P. Allen Allen At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

It was once believed that as you get older you needed more sleep then you got when you were younger. Now, after the advancement of technology and much sleep research we know that once you reach adulthood, the amount of sleep you require varies only a little bit as you age.

However, the sleep patterns that you go through do change. An older person will often sleep much more lightly. As the aging process commences and the body gets older, the quality of sleep that a person gets usually declines and deteriorates. As a person gets older the sleep they receive its less restful, less sufficient, and becomes much lighter. There is a gradual decrease in what's called the delta sleep. The delta sleep is the deepest sleep that a person receives. It's the part of the sleep that is most associated with bodily recovery and growth. By the time a person reaches the age of 50 for men and 60 for women, they receive much less of that deep delta sleep. Sometimes when people reach these ages they receive no delta sleep at all and that can lead to these people being much more easily aroused by noises or other factors that younger people might not hear and sleep through.

Although the length of time a healthy person sleeps does not diminish more than approximately 30 minutes from the age of 20 to about the age of 76, the incidents of problems during sleep does increase. When the person is older sleep is much more disturbed and time sleeping is lost because of interruptions. What this means is that people who reach this age may spend more time in bed and they may believe that they sleep longer, but in actuality the sleep that they frequently receive is often interrupted by very brief periods of wakefulness (these periods may be so brief that the person may not even be aware that they are awake but they are).

Some people who reach these older ages have very many of these short awakenings each night (some older people may have up to several hundred of these awakenings each night), some lasting up to 15 seconds or less. These little awakenings can be so severe that it gives the person the feeling that they've been awake the entire night even though they haven't been. Sometimes, if the person just knows that this is a possibility it aids them in being slightly more relaxed about their sleep. Older people also may take more maps during the daytime, which can cause them to be even more awake at night.

Remember, the quality and the amount of sleep that you get is usually normal if you believe it to be and if your efficiency during your daytime activities is fine and your alertness is not decreased then your sleep is sufficient.

One of the ways in which you can make sure that you get the best nights sleep the is to purchase a memory foam mattress. Made with state of the art technology these mattresses eliminate pressure points and contour to the specific curves of your body. No other mattress can provide this much support. Because of the elimination of pressure points there is no tossing and turning and there is a great reduction in aches and pains that you feel in the morning. So if you have trouble sleeping consider a memory foam mattress.

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