You may have heard it said that if you snooze, you lose, but not so according to Dr. Michael Breus.  Dr. Breus is one of WebMD’s bloggers and in a recent blog he made the case that getting the right amount of sleep can help keep your brain from aging prematurely. 

OMG!  Now, in addition to all the other parts of me that I have to focus my anti-aging efforts on, you are going to throw in my brain?  Don’t I have enough to worry about Dr. Breus?  I was kinda’ counting on my brain to be the one thing that I could fall back on if (or when) all the other parts I am working to preserve go to pot.

Aging…ain’t it grand?!

The only saving grace about anti-aging steps in regard to my brain is that they do seem fairly simple…simple if you have no sleep issues.  Apparently, the brain’s aging is tied to a specific number of sleep hours a night.  As Dr. Breus says it is a Goldilocks kind of approach – it can’t be too little or too much – it needs to be just right.

According to Dr. Breus just right is somewhere between six and eight hours a night.  While that seems easy enough to do on the surface I guess real life coupled with a whole host of other maladies can make getting the right amount of sleep quite difficult for some.  When you add Dr. Breus’ warning that not enough sleep can result in premature aging of the brain, those already struggling to get enough rest have yet another worry that can keep them up nights.

Of course we tend to sleep less as we age.  The days of gleefully sleeping 12-14 hours a day peak in the teenage years and we regretfully move closer to what we perceive are the obligatory eight hours as we move into our adult lives.  Then come pets and babies who have different schedules and agendas, and bosses who have expectations and before you know it sleep becomes the thing we squeeze in when we aren’t doing other things.  Little did you know that while you were living life your life in the fast lane your brain was increasingly veering toward the school zone speed limit.

But never fear, Dr. Breus cites the research and the news is good:

Both men and women who averaged seven hours of sleep performed better on reasoning tests than both people who slept fewer than six hours, as well as people who slept more than eight hours. Most interesting, the researchers involved think that the findings show that consistent sleep routines that include sleeping for around seven hours a night every night can help reduce the regular cognitive decline that happens to all of us as we get older:

• The study tracked men and women over five years and consistently asked them to perform memory, vocabulary, and logic tests.

• The study showed that people who got too little or too much sleep showed a loss in brain function that was like aging four to seven years!

• People tend to sleep less when they age, so maintaining between six to eight hours of sleep a night may be a great natural way to prevent some of that natural memory loss that occurs with aging.

So if you want to keep your brain youthful, consistently get your seven hours of sleep – because let’s face it folks, no one wants a prematurely aged brain.  That is the one part of us we need to not only stay young, but to also help us believe we are still young enough to do some things where we don’t need to use our head.  😉

Day seven hundred and eighty-two of the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C