I understand. It's your birthday today. Yes, it is.
Happy birthday. So how does it feel Just generally
getting older It's great. It's a good feeling. I'm
really happy. I'm really please to have made it this
far. My family friend, Lucas Stein just turned 47 house
his sleep as I age, I sleep. My sleep has really been
difficult to deal with because I sleep a lot less. Um
and and I wake up more Lucas is one of many science ha
shown it is harder to sleep as we age. And a new study
says those, these are even more important five hours or
less of sleep could put you at risk for chronic illness
and that risk just goes up as you age. A recent UK
study looked at 8050 year old civil servants with no
chronic disease and then for Followed up with them at
their doctor's appointments ove the next 25 years. The
findings, 50 year olds who slept five hours or less a
night had a 30% higher risk of developing multi
chronic diseases over time than those who slept at
least seven hours a night. It rose to a 32% greater
risk at age 60 and a 40% greater risk at age 70. The
chronic illnesses mentioned specifically diabetes
cancer, heart disease stroke, heart failure, COPD,
chronic kidney disease, liver disease, depression,
dementia, mental disorders, Parkinson's and arthritis.
So if you're somebody who just feels you gotta go,
gotta go, gotta go and you're only gonna get five or
six hours of sleep. You are definitely putting your
at risk more risk of developing a some type of medic
disorder as you age compared to someone who's getting 7
to 8 hours of sleep. Dr James Rowley practice
pulmonary critical care and sleep medicine at the
Detroit Medical Center. He's also the president elect
of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He says, as
we age our sleep efficiency, sleeping less for the time.
We are in bed worsens too, but it does go down between
that 30 and 60 range to an extent, but really above 61
is that one really decreases how many hours of sleep do
you get a night now, Lucas Um uh consecutively, I'd
no more than about four hours of sleep. There are, I
know there's a couple of studies in progress in like 50
to 70 year old people where they're trying to increas
their sleep duration and seeing if that does improve
their risk profile. We caught up with sleep researcher
Christopher dembner. We first met him in 2019 in
Boulder colorado, where he showed me how sleep studies
worked. He had discovered catch up on sleep did not
help metabolic health, although people sort of reported
feeling better after the weekends, like their alertness
was better and they felt more sort of recovered from
that sleep loss. Their actual metabolic health markers
were not improved, but metabolic health is still a
pretty narrowly defined measure of overall health and
death still believes more sleep is better. He adds them
for those looking to improve their sleep. A sleeping
pill is not always as good as it may seem. Some people
say it's kind of like knocks you out, they might make
you be unconscious and feel like you're sleeping, but
like your brain activity is actually a little bit
different than natural sleep. And so it's really
questionable how effective those are, especially if
you're thinking about using those to improve sleep for
other health outcomes like cardiovascular disease say
that melatonin can be helpful on a very short term
basis for adjusting to a new time zone, but the best
thing anyone can do for better sleep, he says, is to
stay on a regular schedule, sleep in a dark, cool place
and dim their lights to match when the sun is up or
down one quick way to do that because it took people
camping and they had only exposure to sunlight while we
were camping or campfire, that was it. So there were no
electronic devices, so no, no artificial light at all.
And we were like out in the Rocky Mountains in the
middle of nowhere. So there's no like light pollution
or anything like that. And so that's what we did see is
that even just a weekend of camping can adjust your
circadian clock by several hours. Good news for our
friend Lucas. He loves to camp lindsey. These Newsy san
Francisco