Sleep Disorders And Healthy Aging
- December 1st, 2011
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It is said that it is probable that most Americans and northern Europeans do not get enough sleep. A deficiency in sleep can lead to a shortage of concentration (which means being more accident prone); a weaker immune system (more illness) and depression. It is crucial to have enough quality sleep. We all need sufficient decent quality rest, sufficient good quality food and sufficient decent quality exercise.
Aging, or senescence, has its own peculiar effects on the body. In general, the body’s ability to carry out particular functions slows down – it takes it longer to do things or get over things.
Sleep can be one of the functions that suffers and we call it insomnia. It is very often said that old people require less sleep. This is not inevitably the case, but what is true is that they do often get less sleep.
Many people suffer from insomnia, not just older people. Worrying is a cause of sleeplessness; younger folk tend to worry about financial concerns, older folk tend to worry about health issues. Women tend to suffer from insomnia over than men, perhaps they worry more.
Lack of sleep can cause high blood pressure, because the heart is supposed to be resting at night as well, that is it beats more slowly for about eight hours. High blood pressure brings more concerns. Regrettably, we tend to shrug off a bad night’s sleep as if it were an incidence of bad luck. The truth is it can have much more serious consequences than you first think.
In fact heart disease can be caused by over sleeping as well as by under sleeping. One of the most common sleep disorders and also one of the most problematic to detect is sleep apnoea. Doctors cannot detect it without the patient going to sleep in hospital. Sufferers do not normally know that they have it.
The spouse is normally the first person to notice the difficulty: the partner wakes up spluttering with a gasp for air like a drowning man. The sufferer normally stops breathing for between ten seconds and two minutes. It can become very frightening for the partner, but the sufferer seldom wakes up because of it. This can happen dozens of times a night.
If you experience difficulties getting to sleep for a protracted length of time, you should seek professional help, but here are a few tips you can try out. Do not do anything after 7 PM to raise your metabolism or blood pressure, so no strenuous exercise and no high calorie foods (like chocolates). A warm drink of cacao or hot milk assists a great deal of people to get to sleep, but not if you have to get up frequently to go to the toilet.
A sherry or a whisky helps others. An alcoholic drink like this at night is not going to turn you into a gibbering alcoholic (some people talk such drivel), but it can make sleep reliant on a drink. If you can sleep easily after only one drink, you will be alright, if you need a lot more, then the cure is getting to be more of difficulty than the illness.
Enjoy yourself if you are going to or planning a Golfer’s Retirement Party, but if you want to get a better understanding of retirement, please go to our web site Retirement Planning.
