A Good Night's Sleep in later life

BUPA is taking the end of October as a focus point to help everyone get a good night's sleep. Assistant medical director, Dr Paula Franklin explains: "It is not difficult to get into a beneficial regular sleep pattern. If we go to bed and get up at roughly the same time each day, our bodies become used to the routine and the quality of sleep is better."

Here are her tips for the perfect nights sleep:

• One thing you need to learn about yourself is how much sleep you need in order to awake refreshed and ready for the day. For most people this will be between seven and eight hours. Although it might be tempting to believe that we will feel better the longer we can stay in bed, there is no real added benefit to more than eight hours.
• Stick to a routine of going to bed and getting up at the same time each day.

• Don't smoke - it's not only your lungs that are damaged, smoking increases the time it takes to get to sleep.

• Avoid stimulants such as caffeine and alcohol before going to bed as these will interrupt your sleep pattern.
• If you can't sleep, try not to stress yourself further by worrying that you can't sleep. Try reading or something else relaxing to make you sleepy again.
• Although we think a warm, snug bedroom is most welcoming, aim for your room to be about 24 degrees Celcius. This is the most conducive for a good nights sleep.
• If you do find that you struggled to get some sleep one night, you should avoid staying in bed the following day to make up your sleep time. This will only make it harder for you to sleep the next night.

• Install black-out blinds in your bedroom if morning light bothers you, and wear earplugs to reduce noise.

If you feel that you have a serious problem with sleep, you should make an appointment with your GP and discuss your symptoms.

October 2001

The above article is part of the features section of laterlife.com called laterlife interest. laterlife interest contains a variety of articles of interest for visitors to laterlife.com written by a number of experienced and new journalists.

It includes both one off articles and also regular columns of a more specialist nature such as healthwise, reports from the REACH files, mother and daughter and a beauty section called looking good in later life.

Also don't forget to take a look at our regular IT question and answer section called YoucandoIT by IT trainer and author Jackie Sherman.

To view the latest articles and indexes to previous articles click on laterlife interest here or above.  To search for articles about a certain topic, use the site search feature below.

Back to laterlife interest

Site map and site search