Nancy Weinbeck: 5 lessons from the for-profit senior living world
In the wee hours of March 12, we turned the clocks ahead again, hoping that our legislators in Washington D.C. decide that Daylight Savings Time is permanent in the future. In the meantime, many of us (myself definitely included) had a rough time adjusting to the loss of an hour.
Henny Youngman was on to something when he said, “If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.” Besides the joke, for many of us, sleeping late means getting the actual seven to eight hours sleep we really need each night. Is this important? After reading Matthew Walker’s book “Why We Sleep,” I began to grasp that getting a good night’s sleep is not only good, it’s primary to healthy aging.
One part of his book I found particularly fascinating was the topic of sleep spindles, a growing area of research. Sleep spindles are a certain pattern of brain waves identified by measuring electrical activity through electroencephalography. Sleep spindle activity occurs during earlier stages of sleep known as non-REM sleep.
Sleep spindles appear to play a critical role in the processing and retention of memories. Sleep spindles are the worker bees that take newly learned information and allow the regions of our brains associated with memory to absorb and retain this new data. Unfortunately, the amount of sleep spindle activity may decline as we age.
This does not have to be our destiny. By improving our behaviors to prioritize a good night’s sleep, it appears that we can actually increase sleep spindle activity and thereby mitigate potential memory loss as we age.
There are a lot of interesting recommendations on the internet for ways to increase sleep spindles and who knows, some of them might work. Oscillating sounds, anyone?
But one thing that research agrees on is getting a good night’s sleep is critical. For myself, I’m beginning to bump sleep to the top of my self-care priorities. I hope that will help me to remember to exercise. Kidding aside, and in the spirit of Henny Youngman, I’ll look forward to sleeping late but without doing something I’ll regret the night before, of course.
Happy daylight in the evening folks, and here’s to a good night’s sleep!
Nancy Weinbeck is the CEO of Bayview in Queen Anne.