Two Nights of Broken Sleep Can Make People Feel Years Older, Finds Study (theguardian.com) 43
Two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, according to researchers, who said consistent, restful slumber was a key factor in helping to stave off feeling one's true age. From a report: Psychologists in Sweden found that, on average, volunteers felt more than four years older when they were restricted to only four hours of sleep for two consecutive nights, with some claiming the sleepiness made them feel decades older. The opposite was seen when people were allowed to stay in bed for nine hours, though the effect was more modest, with participants in the study claiming to feel on average three months younger than their real age after ample rest.
"Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it's not only your long-term sleep patterns," said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. "Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel." Beyond simply feeling more decrepit, the perception of being many years older may affect people's health, Balter said, by encouraging unhealthy eating, reducing physical exercise, and making people less willing to socialise and engage in new experiences.
"Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it's not only your long-term sleep patterns," said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. "Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel." Beyond simply feeling more decrepit, the perception of being many years older may affect people's health, Balter said, by encouraging unhealthy eating, reducing physical exercise, and making people less willing to socialise and engage in new experiences.
So, living with an alarm cat is making me feel old (Score:2)
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Not older, just more sleepy (Score:4, Insightful)
I rarely have what one calls normal sleep, and those times where I have a serious lack of sleep for days on end I only feel more tired and sleepy, not older.
Luckily I can try to grab some sleep just about any time I think I actually might fall asleep.
Tired (Score:1)
Lost sleep makes you feel tired.
That would be another way to phrase this.
Thank you, The Science.
My rule (Score:2)
I stay in bed on weekends until my body feels sore, then I know it is time to wake up :D
Either that or my cat gets sick of us sleeping in.
What is this 'sleep'? (Score:2)
I sometimes pass out at my desk. Is that sleep?
tRuSt thE SciEnCe (Score:3, Insightful)
TruSt tHE SciENcE
The Science: Stating the obvious -- water's wet, fire's hot, sleepless nights make for tired people WHERE'S MUH MILLIONZ IN GRANT MONNNNEY?!?!
No wonder people lost faith in all our institutions -- not just "scientists"
Re:tRuSt thE SciEnCe (Score:4, Insightful)
The Science: Stating the obvious -- water's wet, fire's hot, sleepless nights make for tired people
But also the less obvious: leaded gasoline has bad effects on kids, and smoking cigarettes leads to cancer and heart disease.
WHERE'S MUH MILLIONZ IN GRANT MONNNNEY?!?!
Remember that the "ethyl" (really Pb) industry and the tobacco industry spent decades trying to discredit the scientific research that was threatening them. Follow the money!
No wonder people lost faith in all our institutions -- not just "scientists"
Not helped by astroturfing industry groups, who are delighted when people put scare quotes around the word "scientists".
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But also the less obvious: leaded gasoline has bad effects on kids, and smoking cigarettes leads to cancer and heart disease.
lovely and all, but not in this study. hes talking about the shit science like this, not polio cures.
and what about the growing suspicion a lot of studies arent reproducible or are just plain crap? how many years in education, often in the best country in the world, and this is the best they come up with. Ive said it before and Ill say it again, people are fucking idiots
So you're mad that there's a replication crisis in some parts of science.
And you're also mad that people are performing studies to confirm (and further investigate) things that people generally assume to be true.
It doesn't occur to you that the second thing you're mad about helps fix the first thing you're mad about?
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Leaded gasoline exposure confirmed.
I have segmented sleep pattern (Score:4, Interesting)
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That was our original sleep pattern for most of human history, anyway. Only with the industrial revolution did we change to a singly nightly block of sleep. If anything, your kind of sleep pattern is healthier.
Re:I have segmented sleep pattern (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. Talk radio was very popular in the 1600s.
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How many hours is that per day?
They actually needed to study this? (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly the researchers have never had children.
Glad money was spent on that. (Score:1)
That's cute (Score:2)
Two nights. For me it's usually broken sleep for weeks and months at a time interrupted by one or two of somewhat restful sleep.
I'm 42. I certainly don't feel like it. Today I went shopping for plants which I then planted in the yard. The planting didn't take more than an hour and a half. Yet I feel like I've run 10 miles. Or at least I assume that's the feeling one would have. Running ten miles feels completely and utterly inhuman to me.
I cannot fathom how marathon runners do it or how one can cross the ch
This article (Score:3)
This article makes me feel SIX years older.
When you ask people if they feel older, it's not a double blind. Everyone knows they missed a night of sleep, and that knowledge is going to impact their perception when answering questions about their own well being.
I prefer the good old days when we would do a test like this and measure people's blood pressure or white blood cell count or really any other objective measurement.
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The measure "subjective age" is just idiotic to begin with. What the hell does it mean to say "I feel three months younger"?
As if people have a sense of what feeling is associated with their biological age that is precise enough to warrant detailed numerical measurement and (inter-subject!) aggregation. Undoubtedly subjects are going to do some fairly random mental mapping from "I feel like shit" to "I feel # years older".
Re: This article (Score:2)
And that obe guy that insists he is a thousand years old completely swamps the numerical results.
What about 2 months of broken sleep? (Score:3)
I got Covid for the first time at the end of January and I haven't slept right since. Trouble falling asleep, and when I do fall asleep I either wake up multiple times during the night or I get really really shallow sleep- kind of like twilight anesthesia where I am asleep- but I am aware that I'm sleeping. I feel terrible, both mentally and physically. Irritable, short-tempered, lots of body aches, appetite is all screwed up, and so on.
So by that logic... (Score:1)
Ima let you finnish your "this is a study?" commen (Score:1)
Toddlers must age parent by centuries. (Score:2)
By this logic my toddler has aged me 463 years. Feels about right.
A PhD is needed? (Score:3)
When any 18 year old PFC at Ft Benning could tell you that.
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This illustrates why you generally don't want to hire a PhD programmer.
I work night shift (Score:2)
You insensitive clod!
How is this a publishable result? (Score:4, Informative)
"People who only got four hours of sleep for the past two nights generally don't feel as good as people who have been sleeping well". Yes, OK, what of it? You're not telling us anything that wasn't blindingly obvious to begin with.
The only reason this "study" is getting attention in the media is this: The researchers, evidently, used some sort of bizarre questionnaire that asked people to rate their sense of well-being in terms of how "old" or "young" they feel. As someone who works with psychometric scales for a living, I think this is a pretty dumb way to quantify how someone feels (it's imprecise, nonspecific, and doesn't give any information that you couldn't obtain through other, well-validated scales).
I can relate to this,to an extent .... (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I always get more than just 4 hours of sleep a night. But I tend to be more of a "night person" who can't even get to bed before midnight, and yet I have work during the week that expects me there in the morning. So I'm definitely shaving an hour or so a night off the "ideal" amount of sleep I should really be getting each week.
I find that on a weekend when I can sleep in later, I wake up with more energy and essentially feeling a bit "younger". And as a work week rolls on, I often get to fe
That methodology (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one that thinks this is a horrible unscientific methodology that in no way supports the sensational conclusions? I would have no clue how to assess myself to answer this question. Hmm I feel more alert than yesterday how many years is that? If I feel worse how do I liken that to a more advanced age I've never been? There seems to be no science here linking age properly and just a subjective feeling of better or worse being forced into some vague and unreliable age metric.
You feel like shit when you don't get sleep? (Score:2)
I'm glad we did a study to confirm this. There are probably ones of people out there who didn't discover this the first time they had to study for tests when they were kids.
But how do you FEEL? (Score:2)
Subjective age was based on asking study participants this question: “On some days you may feel older or younger than your calendar age. What age do you feel right now?”
This seems like a totally worthless question to me. What's the precision on the expected answer? Maybe I feel like 35.3 years now, but yesterday I felt like 35.8 years? My precision would be on the order of decades. And my scale would change from hour to hour depending on my mental and emotional state. Asking for for subjec
Well, now I know... (Score:1)
...why I feel like I'm 215 years old.
A Biblical paradox solved! (Score:2)
This helps explain how Methuselah supposedly lived for something like 800 years. He probably had a houseful of kids, and got his last decent night's sleep the day before the first one arrived. So maybe he was only 50, but he felt like 800+