Sleep is important no matter what age you are in. Seniors do need sleep especially if they are trying to nurse their body back to health; they need sleep as much as any younger adults do. Sleep is essential for all living humans; this is the time when the body restores itself. If the body doesn’t get its required sleep every single day, it will not be able to repair itself properly. Your body’s restorative cycle is then broken down resulting to minor nerve dysfunction each time you miss a goodnight’s sleep. These nerves are your body’s main “message” ways which connect and transmit messages all throughout your body. Just imagine if you messed-up these neurotransmitters badly by not getting enough sleep accumulatively overtime. It was even suggested that lack of sleep results to plaques in the brain; an indicator of Alzheimer’s disease.
Unfortunately, it gets doubly hard for seniors to get enough sleep for many varying reasons; some of them are for health reasons, medications and abnormal sleeping patterns. These, among other reasons, get in the way of senior’s goodnight sleep. A study was found that seniors age 65 years and above experience chronic sleep disturbances that usually leave them feeling sluggish and unenergetic in the morning. This is because your circadian rhythm is wrecked.
Circadian rhythm is your body’s 24-hour clock; it tells your body when it’s time to sleep and wake up. It encompasses your basic biochemical, physiological and behavioral processes. In layman’s term, this is when you feel sleepy and you start to slow down, something like your body shutting down and getting ready for sleep. You will understand this better if you experienced jetlag in the past. All living things, including plants and animals have circadian cycle or rhythm.
Your circadian rhythm solely depends on the light and dark patterns entering your eyes. This is not your usual light bulb pattern but your 24-hour solar light, night and day pattern. The nerves in your eyes process the signals to be sent to the master clock of the brain. Sadly, these nerves deteriorate overtime and get affected with age-related macular diseases such as hypertensive retinopathy. If and when this happens, your circadian rhythm will only get limited amount of solar light and therefore cannot send the right signals to the master clock.
Alzheimer’s disease can also affect a person’s sleeping pattern because of neural deficiencies common to sufferer of the disease. Lack of outdoor activity for seniors can also add up to development of irregular sleeping pattern among seniors. Although there are light devices in the market today that help stimulate your circadian rhythm, they are sometimes too bright and glaring and would therefore defeat its purpose altogether. One research found out that blue light works better than white light in stimulating our circadian rhythm. The project for this finding is still on-going and developers are hoping this is the answer to seniors’ sleep problems.
