Jul 9, 2026 · 36 min · 10 segments
As you've gotten older, you might notice that your sleep has changed — maybe it's the amount of sleep, the quality of your sleep or even your ability to fall asleep. But why does this happen? On…
Melissa BoginGuestKristin MeinzerHostTo begin with, how does sleep naturally change as we age, particularly in our 60s and beyond?
my patients, they're like, something has changed with my sleep as I've gotten older.
There's been a lot of research that's been done in probably the last 50 years about this topic.
We know that when you go to sleep, there's a specific type of way that our brain looks when we're asleep, when we're younger and when we're older.
When you look at a younger person sleeping, they have this really lovely cyclical process during the night where the brain ends up going into deeper sleep, and then we end up going into lighter sleep, which is often what we think about with REM sleep.
If we look at an older person in contrast, what we'll see is that most of the time, older individuals are not going into as deep of sleep.
What about the fact that when they are asleep, a lot of them have to get up many times during the night to go to the bathroom, for example? What about that kind of stop and start kind of sleep?
To begin with, how does sleep naturally change as we age, particularly in our 60s and beyond?
my patients, they're like, something has changed with my sleep as I've gotten older.
There's been a lot of research that's been done in probably the last 50 years about this topic.
We know that when you go to sleep, there's a specific type of way that our brain looks when we're asleep, when we're younger and when we're older.
When you look at a younger person sleeping, they have this really lovely cyclical process during the night where the brain ends up going into deeper sleep, and then we end up going into lighter sleep, which is often what we think about with REM sleep.
If we look at an older person in contrast, what we'll see is that most of the time, older individuals are not going into as deep of sleep.
What about the fact that when they are asleep, a lot of them have to get up many times during the night to go to the bathroom, for example? What about that kind of stop and start kind of sleep?
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