Sleepy Time, Weepy Time

As a kid, you hate it when Mom tells you to go to bed. You wait for her to leave the room, then crawl under your covers and turn on a flashlight. As a high school student, you stay up late talking to friends, feet propped up on the kitchen table, much to the disapproving sighs of your parents. As a college student, you chug espressos in the middle of the night, working furiously on the next deadline. Procrastination doesn’t seem like such a good idea now, does it? 

When you’re young, pushing off bedtime doesn’t seem like it matters. There are never obvious repercussions, so why should you care? Well, after this article, I hope you all will start to value your sleep more, because it’s going to change, and soon. 

As humans, we have something in our bodies called a circadian rhythm. This isn’t a real clock, but it’s more of the idea of a biological alarm clock inside our heads telling us “it’s time to get up” or “it’s time to get some shut-eye.” The normal circadian cycle is 5 phases, and older people experience something called a phase advance, which basically means they sleep earlier and get up earlier, thanks to their circadian alarm clock giving them the “wake-up” signal at 5 am rather than say, 9 am.

In general, the total amount of time older people spend asleep is less. To throw out some numbers, babies sleep 16-20 hours a day, adults generally sleep 7-8 hours, but people over 60 only get 6 to 6 ½ hours a day. That’s not good, because sleep is the time of day when our bodies get a chance to recover from a whole day of work. Obviously, your organs don’t just stop working when you’re asleep (because then you would also stop breathing), but sleep is the time for your body to take a break; your heart doesn’t have to pump as hard, your lungs take in oxygen steadily and breathe out in a stable way, your brain doesn’t have to send signals everywhere like a crazy control center. 

And remember when I talked about the 5 phases of sleep? Well, older people get way less of the 4th stage, which is the deepest and the most invigorating phase. This stage, also known as delta sleep, is where all the good things of sleep generally happen. Memory is boosted, the brain gets rid of extra cells that it doesn’t need, the liver throws out toxins you may have eaten during the day (cough alcohol). And your immune system gets stronger! Which is why sleeping when you’re sick is so good for you. 

As if that isn’t depressing enough, there’s more upsetting information I need to give you about sleep and aging. In addition to losing out on all the goodies that the 4th stage of sleep can bring, older people also get less of the 5th stage- REM sleep. This stage is probably what most people who don’t know much about science think as “sleep.” This is when you dream and it’s called REM which stands for Rapid Eye Movement because your eyes actually flutter a lot during dreaming. For young people, muscles are inhibited during REM, which means you can’t act out your dreams, which means you stay on the bed. I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.

Sadly, older people are much more likely to develop something called REM-sleep behavior disorder, which basically means that muscle paralysis I talked about earlier is gone. Which means they sleepwalk. In mild cases, this might not be that problematic, but if the disorder gets worse, patients can pretty much do everything they can awake while asleep- and that means they will try to eat, turn on a stove, swat a fly, or walk down the stairs. And they’re sleeping the whole time. Which means they will probably miss their mouth, forget to turn off the stove or burn themselves, miss the fly and end up smacking a wall, or trip down the stairs. All not good things. 

What does this mean in the brain? REM-sleep behavior disorder is believed to involve problems with the brainstem neurons, which are the brain cells that make up the very bottom of your brain, the part that is connected to your spinal cord. In addition, the cerebellum, which is a little round part of your brain in the back of your head, usually deals with balance and motor skills, so damaging this structure in some way makes someone way more likely to get REM-sleep behavior disorder. 

Oh wow. Who knew sleeping could get so scary? It just goes to show you, aging comes with a huge amount of problems in the brain and body, most of which very few people truly understand. So it’s my job to tell you, and your job to learn. Right after you get some rest. 

— Allie Yuxin Lin