Another day, another researcher churning out statistics about the beneficial effects of a good night’s sleep, and the difficulty of getting those elusive 8 hours.
Sonia Ancoli-Israeli, Ph.D. of the University of California states that women who are aged 60 or older are nine times more likely to report good mental and physical health if they manage to regularly get a full night of sleep.
How many people are managing this? It’s a mere 32 percent of Americans over 50 years of age surveyed recently by Gallup. There’s a lot of reasons why, from the generic effects of ageing through to chronic pain, or other underlying conditions.
There are many factors at play in this tale of woe, and Sleep Apnea, any reader of this blog should be unsurprised to read, is identified as a key stealer of sleep in the middle-aged. As you should know by now, it causes an interruption to breathing whilst one is asleep, which causes a corresponding dip in oxygen levels in the blood. As an emergency measure, the brain disrupts the normal pattern of sleep to get the airways clear, which gets you breathing again, but lessens the quality of the sleep you are getting. It has also been linked directly to an increased likelihood of depression, diabetes, and strokes.
As a treatment for this, Doctor Ancoli-Israeli recommends avoiding alcohol, and some sleep medications before you go to bed. She also gives the familiar advice of sleeping on your side, to stop those obstructions and keep the airways clear. There’s also mention of the CPAP machine, which is a mechanised mask and pump arrangement which maintains a certain level of airflow and air pressure throughout the lungs and respiratory system through the night.
It’s good to see more and more people recognising the importance of good sleep, and more advice out there. The more we as a population make good sleep a priority in our daily lives and routines, the healthier as a population we’ll be.
It would have been a bit more positive to hear of some of the milder solutions to sleep apnea in this study, however- not everyone is going to be able to sleep with a machine strapped to their face, and to be frank, not everyone needs to either. There are a lot of very simple Snoring Aids out there that can make a world of difference, without resorting to such measures.
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