Seniors need seven to nine hours of sleep daily at night. However, medical conditions like circadian rhythm disorder and other, mostly age related, conditions prevent seniors from getting sufficient amount of sleep. Good sleep hygiene enhances the quality and quantity of sleep and helps preserve their physical and mental well being, personal safety, and quality of life. Home Care Newcastle, NSW experts discuss these 3 reasons to help seniors and family caregivers understand the importance of good sleep hygiene.
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Essential for Brain Function
The human brain needs rest to work properly as well as to develop new neural pathways, necessary for learning and memory. Maintaining brain health allows older adults learn new things like hobbies and solve complex problems in daily life and games as well.
A well rested brain also allows elderly to express the boost of creativity, make decisions, and pay attention and understand the happenings in their surroundings. The inability to stay alert hinders the prompt responding function of the brain to various circumstances, further leading to injury.
Insufficient sleep affects mood and seniors can even get irritated, angry, or depressed over very little things. They may also engage in safety-compromising impulsive behaviors.
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Promotes Physical Wellbeing
Just like young people, seniors also need enough sleep to maintain physical wellbeing and health. Sleep offers body the time to repair the heart, blood vessels, muscles, painful areas, skin, and other tissues. Habitual sleep deprivation is also associated with the seniors’ increasing risk of contracting diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease. Insufficient sleep also leads to obesity.
When sleeping, the endocrine system helps regulate the flow of hormones in the body. The hormone ghrelin regulates hunger and leptin sustains energy balance but ghrelin levels elevate and leptin levels decline due to insufficient and increase the chances of getting obese. Sleep also controls the body response to insulin. Insufficient sleep increases the blood sugar levels and may lead to diabetes over time. Besides enabling physical growth in younger years, growth hormones help the body’s ability to perform repairs in seniors. Plenty of sleep also helps the immune system to function more efficiently.
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Improves Daytime Function and Safety
A sufficient amount of is essential to help seniors prevent from feeling tired or fatigued during daylight hours. It also helps elderly with responding appropriately to possible hazards and offers the energy they need to carry daily activities.
Poor sleep hygiene often leads to microsleep, a condition that occurs when people are awake. Seniors are normally not aware of the events when it occurs. For example, when someone is driving down the road and forgetting the journey. When an episode of microsleep occurs, seniors may miss important information given by their doctor. The occurrence of microsleep when driving may prohibit an older adult from reacting properly to a situation, which increases the risk of accidents. It can also hinder work performance of seniors.
If your senior loved one is experiencing sleep deprivation or micro-sleep, consider turning to home care experts to get your loved one the help he or she needs to get an adequate amount of sleep to stay healthy and safe and age in place to achieve longevity.
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