Don’t believe the short sleepers. Those one-percenters — Martha Stewart and Elon Musk, among them — all claim to get by just fine on less than six hours of sleep a night. But sleep is meant to repair and restore, and research shows that unless you’re among the 1 percent with the “short sleeper” gene, you need at least seven hours a night to make that happen. No surprise, many of us — 1 in 3 — aren’t logging that many hours, and if we are, we aren’t doing so consistently or without waking throughout the night. That’s especially true as we age and begin to experience a shift in how we cycle through the different stages of sleep — what sleep experts call “sleep architecture.”
“As we get older, our sleep becomes more shallow and broken up, and the amount of deep sleep decreases somewhat,” explains Michael Grandner, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine Tucson. “This may be due to more sleep disrupters and medical issues interfering with our ability to get deep sleep, or it may just be a natural part of aging. We also tend to get more interruptions to sleep, for longer periods of time, as we get older.”
To learn about important strategies to improve your chances of sleeping through the night, from AARP, CLICK HERE.
