Don’t FEEl guIlty IF you nEED A nAp
IT’s long been said that as you get older, you sleep less. But this has now been shown to be a myth, with extensive research from the University of California published this week showing that older people need just as much sleep as their younger counterparts. I’m fascinated by sleep because so many patients complain about difficulties with it and I was fortunate to work many years ago with a boss who was an expert in sleep in older people. he argued that our whole sleeping routine is wrong. Until the invention of the electric light, people would typically have two sleeps rather than one. They would sleep for a few hours once it got dark, then wake and go about jobs or talk for a few more hours, then go back to sleep. This appears to be much more akin to how our bodies are actually designed when it comes to sleep cycles. Modern life has meant that we have to cram our sleep into one spell, which we are not naturally inclined to do. What’s interesting is that, freed from the constraints of employment, lots of older people do seem to adopt this pattern of two sleeps. They have a snooze mid-afternoon, then have a shortened sleep at night. They’re still getting their seven to nine hours of sleep a day, it’s just split up. My former boss was convinced this was better for us and more refreshing. It’s true that some older people do develop sleep problems later in life because, as the brain ages, the parts that regulate sleep degrade, meaning there’s less deep sleep. Insomnia was a very common complaint when I worked in care homes. however, it was often a complicated issue. One of the aspects of care homes that really makes my blood boil is the way that the lives of the residents are often expected to revolve around the staff shift patterns. so, typically, residentsr would be woken at 8am and given breakfast, lunch would be served around 11.30am, then supper ata about 4.30pm, followed by bed. Then, there’d be complaints that residents wouldn’t be able to sleep — well, of course they couldn’t! Their entire sleep pattern was disrupted because they were forced to lie in bed for extended periods of time. Anyone who wanted to go to bed at a normal time of, say, 10.30pm, but who required assistance, was refused because this would disrupt the night-shift routine. I’dI’ often be asked by nursing staff to prescribep sleeping tablets for residents becauseb they had insomnia, when in factfa they were getting all the sleep they needed and were awake simply because they’d been in bed for too long. It made me wonder how many prescriptions for sleeping tablets in nursing homes are really necessary — and how many are given to force the residents to fit in with the staff.