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Not getting enough deep sleep as we age can have long-term negative consequences. The researchers found that the middle-aged participants who slept fewer than six hours nightly instead of seven had a 30-percent higher risk of developing dementia.Īnother study from 2019 found a similar correlation between lack of sleep and early Alzheimer’s disease but emphasized the need for deep sleep. They made a strong case for the necessity for adequate sleep. They did a 25-year follow-up of nearly 8,000 participants from the Whitehall II study of British civil servants. The University of Paris researchers were all experts in the epidemiology of aging and neurodegenerative diseases. It covered the association between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease.
Not getting deep sleep how to#
I’m grateful to have figured out how to sleep better before it was too late, because not getting enough deep sleep can result in a host of health problems!Įarlier this week, a newly published paper in the Nature Communications Journal caught my attention. "Let your brain settle a bit to provide good preconditions to sleep," Professor Hillman said.I haven’t slept this good since I was in my early teens, and the solution was fairly simple. If you are going to keep using your phone before bed, the Sleep Health Foundation recommends dimming the screen as much as possible, using a blue light filter, and putting the phone away at least 30 minutes before you plan to go to sleep. There's many apps out there to help people monitor screen time or block apps at certain times of day.Consider replacing your smartphone with a "dumb phone" that has limited internet capabilities.Tinker your settings to convert your screen to black-and-white to make the phone less appealing.Reintroduce alarm clocks and watches back into your life.Don't charge your phone in your bedroom (a 2016 University of Virginia study revealed that one in 10 smartphone users have checked their phones during sex).What can I do to put down my phone and get some sleep? "Stopping cold turkey is just too hard," she said.
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Sometimes the solution involved addressing a person's anxiety by gradually increasing the amount of time they went between checking their phone. "They say you need to be online or else you're missing out - it's a very difficult Catch-22 situation."
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Meanwhile, blue light filters that are claimed to make screens less harmful to sleep are now standard with most mobile phone operating systems. Parents of young children are advertised special "charge boxes" in which they can lock the family's several devices overnight - out of reach. In a sign of the growing awareness of how phones are eating into sleep time, recent years have seen a slew of products designed to fix the problem. "We’re now seeing 9- and 10-year-olds who not only own their own mobile phone, but they also overuse it." So, is locking up your phone the solution? "The numbers are bigger, and the age at which kids start is getting younger. "And it seems the main reason for that is our digital screens," he said. He said 93 per cent of high school students were not getting adequate sleep.Ībout 75 per cent had a level of "chronic sleepiness" - more than double 2005's 35 per cent. Professor Hillman said both the stimulating content on the phones and the light from the screens themselves made it harder to achieve sleep.ĭr Seton said surveys showed chronic sleep deprivation among 12 to 18-year-olds had doubled since 2005.
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