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Sleep is an important factor in our overall health. However, it also affects our perception of whether we feel younger or older:
Sleep Can Help You Feel Younger
A new study discovered that sleep between seven to nine hours could help one feel rejuvenated. Also, this affects one's perception of themselves -- leaving them feeling younger.
Research has demonstrated that feeling younger is linked to greater physical and mental well-being as well as a longer life span.
"While the previous literature has shown that feeling older is associated with worse sleep quality, our data indicate that sleep may be more important for subjective age than the other way around," wrote clinical neuroscientists Leonie Balter and John Axelsson from Sweden's Karolinska Institute. "These findings support that sleep, a vital biological phenomenon, might hold the key to feeling young."
Balter and Axelsson conducted two experiments to investigate how sleep alters one's sense of self. In the first study, 429 people between the ages of 18 and 70 participated in a survey about several elements of their lives, including how young they felt, how many days they had gone without sleep in the previous month, and how sleepy they were.
On average, people who slept fully through the entire 30 days felt 5.8 years younger than they were. The average participant felt 0.23 years older for every night they did not get adequate sleep.
To find out more, the duo evaluated 186 adults 46 years old and older to see how they responded to two nights of four hours of sleep. The participants were allowed to sleep nine hours a night for two more nights.
The evenings of sleep restriction caused participants to feel, on average, 4.4 years older than they would have on a full sleep night.
Furthermore, there was a strong correlation between judgments of age and sensations of alertness and tiredness. The most alert participants were found to feel four years younger on average, while the sleepiest individuals felt six years older than their true age.
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Irregular Sleep Pattern Increases Risk of Dementia
Another study suggests that it's not enough to sleep seven to nine hours to be healthy. One should reportedly maintain a regular sleeping pattern because irregular sleeping habits could increase one's risk of dementia.
To examine how sleep patterns affect the likelihood of dementia, Matthew Pase, an Australian professor and dementia researcher at Monash University, and his colleagues studied 88,094 people who were, on average, 62 years old.
Participants wore a gadget to track their sleep cycle for over seven days. Then, the subjects were monitored for an average of seven years. 480 people were affected by dementia at the time.
Pase defines sleep regularity as the regularity or consistency of daily sleep-wake cycles. The sleep regularity index was calculated as the probability of being in the same state (awake or asleep) at any given time, separated by 24 hours and averaged over a week.
A person would obtain a score of 100 if they regularly go to bed and wake up at the exact times every day and 0 otherwise. Those with irregular sleep schedules received lower scores than the sample average of 60.
Those with highly erratic sleep patterns had a much-increased chance of developing dementia than people with an average sleep regularity score. However, those who slept at a regular time did not experience a reduction in this risk.
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Check out more news and information on Sleep in Science Times.