5 Reasons You’re Still Sleeping Terribly After 50 — Even When You’re Exhausted

One of the strangest parts about getting older is that you may still need sleep just as badly while becoming considerably worse at staying asleep.

Sleep is not one continuous state. Throughout the night, your brain moves through different stages of lighter sleep, deeper slow-wave sleep and REM sleep. When you were younger, you could probably sleep through things that seem ridiculous now. A television playing in another room, a dog walking around the house, your partner getting up to use the bathroom or a car door slamming outside might barely have registered.

After 50, that can change.

As people age, sleep generally becomes lighter and more fragmented, while the amount of time spent in deeper sleep tends to decline. That means relatively minor disturbances can become much more capable of dragging you back toward consciousness.

Your partner moves. The room gets too warm. You hear something outside. Your bladder gives you the slightest reason to get up. Suddenly you are awake.

The bigger problem is that once you have been pulled out of sleep, there is no guarantee that you are going straight back down.

This is why simply measuring sleep by the number of hours spent in bed can be misleading. Seven and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep and seven and a half hours broken into pieces may look identical on paper, but they can feel completely different the following morning.

The problem may not always be how long you are sleeping. It may be how often that sleep is being interrupted.

This may be the most frustrating contradiction of all. You can barely keep your eyes open on the sofa. You brush your teeth half asleep, walk into the bedroom and climb under the covers already thinking you will be unconscious within minutes.

Then your brain decides that now would be the perfect time to review every unfinished problem in your life. You start thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, something that happened at work, your mortgage, your children, your parents, an email you forgot to answer or a bill you need to pay.

Physically, you are exhausted. Mentally, somebody has apparently turned all the lights back on.

This happens because falling asleep is not simply a question of becoming tired enough. Your body also needs to transition out of the alert state it has been operating in throughout the day.

For many people over 50, daily life has not exactly become calmer. Careers may carry more responsibility than they did twenty years ago. Children still have problems, only now those problems can involve mortgages, relationships or grandchildren. Aging parents may suddenly require attention. Finances often become more serious as retirement gets closer.

The body may stop moving at the end of the day, but the nervous system does not always get the memo.

That is also why advice such as “just go to bed earlier” can feel almost insulting. Going to bed at 9:30 instead of 10:30 does not accomplish much if you simply spend the extra hour staring at the ceiling.

There is another pattern that becomes increasingly common as people get older. You start becoming sleepy earlier in the evening.

At 8:30PM, the sofa feels incredible. By 9:15PM, you are thinking about heading to bed. You decide to take advantage of it and get an early night.

Then at 3:30AM, your body apparently decides that sleep is finished.

This is not necessarily random.

Your body has an internal timing system, often referred to as the circadian rhythm, that helps regulate when you feel sleepy and when you feel awake. That rhythm can shift with age, and many older adults begin feeling sleepy earlier in the evening and waking earlier in the morning.

That sounds harmless until your body’s preferred schedule stops matching the life you actually want to live.

Very few people want to start their day at 4AM. So you remain in bed and desperately try to manufacture another two or three hours of sleep. The longer you stay awake, the more frustrated you become. The more frustrated you become, the more awake you feel.

Eventually, you start doing sleep mathematics. “If I fall asleep right now, I can still get another two hours and forty-seven minutes.”

It is difficult to imagine a thought less conducive to relaxation.

Sometimes poor sleep does not come from one dramatic problem. It comes from twenty small ones.

Your shoulder aches when you lie on one side, so you roll over. Your hip becomes uncomfortable, so you move again. The room gets too warm. Then too cold. You need to use the bathroom. Your partner starts snoring. Your legs feel restless.

Eventually you settle down, only to realize that you are now fully awake.

For many women, menopause and the years surrounding it can add another layer of difficulty through hot flashes and night sweats. Men may notice they are waking more often to urinate. Joint discomfort, reflux, certain medications and other health issues can also begin interfering with sleep.

Then there is snoring. Plenty of people spend years assuming they are simply “bad sleepers” when their sleep is actually being interrupted repeatedly because their breathing is being disturbed.

Persistent loud snoring, gasping, choking during sleep or extreme daytime sleepiness should not simply be written off as getting older. Those symptoms can warrant proper medical investigation.

Even without one major sleep disorder, however, enough minor disruptions can turn what appears to be a full night of sleep into something considerably less restorative.

This is where poor sleep can turn into a vicious cycle.

You sleep terribly, so naturally you compensate the following day. You have another coffee in the morning, then another after lunch because the first one no longer seems to do much. By late afternoon you are fading badly, so perhaps you have one more.

You get home exhausted and collapse on the sofa. Maybe you accidentally sleep for forty minutes. Then bedtime arrives and, despite spending the entire day complaining about how tired you are, you somehow cannot fall asleep.

Other people reach for alcohol because it makes them feel sleepy. It may indeed make falling asleep easier for some people, but that does not necessarily mean the second half of the night is going to be particularly restful.

Then morning arrives. You slept badly again.

So what happens? More caffeine. Another nap. Another desperate attempt to catch up. Poor sleep has now started creating behaviours that can make good sleep even more difficult.

Eventually, people start reaching for anything promising an immediate fix. Melatonin, sleeping tablets, herbal blends, nighttime drinks, powders, teas and supplements begin accumulating in the cupboard.

Before long, the average person can end up with enough sleep products to sedate a small zoo.

The problem is that many of those solutions are approached with one objective: make me unconscious as quickly as possible.