Daydreaming About a Good Night’s Sleep

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:26:24 +0000

As a chiropractor, I treat many older people. Over the years, I have noted that as men and women age, the quality of sleep they get at night alters drastically, especially among women who are post-menopausal. I’d often attributed the sleep differences between my particular male and female chiropractic patients, to stress levels, mainly because the women who complained about not getting enough sleep were more “tightly-wound” than most of men who came to see me. However, a new study conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, indicates that even though elderly women in a sleep study reported shorter and a poorer quality of sleep, they were actually getting longer and less-interrupted sleep than the elderly men in the study.

The participants, aged 59 to 97 years old, were asked to wear an accelerometer that measured their sleep activity, and also to keep a sleep diary for six consecutive nights. According to the study, the female participants reported an increase in the time it took them to fall asleep, a shorter sleep time, and poorer sleep quality than the male participants reported. However, after examining data from the accelerometer measurements researchers discovered that the women had actually slept longer and experienced less sleep disturbances than the men. In fact, the study found that men actually overestimated the amount of sleep they got and the quality of their sleep. In other words, the men may have been “daydreaming” about getting a good night’s sleep!

Technorati Tags: sleep quality, sleep research

A Daydreamer » sleep research

Daydreaming About a Good Night’s Sleep