It's not a rumor, it's a fact! The elderly really do wake up earlier

It is not an urban legend that people wake up earlier as they get older, but a reality. Research has found that human sleep decreases by 30 minutes every 10 years.

Experts recommend that people get at least seven hours of sleep a night and go to bed at the same time every night. However, as we move into middle age, the average amount of time people sleep at night decreases by 30 minutes every 10 years. They also tend to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. This seems to be a natural aging process and there are many reasons for it.

Aging and the pattern of going to sleep and waking up early are fundamentally related to the brain. Like many parts of the body, the brain becomes less responsive as we age. Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy, Director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at Arizona Health Sciences University, said, "The brain's connections probably don't perceive and respond to inputs as well as they should as we age." These inputs are cues that help determine where you are during the day, such as daylight, social cues, meal times and physical activity. If you were locked in a room with no light and no food, it would not only be a form of torture. It would also be very difficult to determine what day and time of day it was. But young people's brains pick up these cues. But in older adults, because of natural brain degeneration, these cues don't make connections in the brain. This is also one reason why older people get tired earlier than the younger generation, requiring them to go to bed earlier and therefore wake up earlier.

The eyes also play an important role in receiving external signals and, of course, vision changes with age. "Interestingly, one of the reasons for vision changes with age seems to be that our brain reduces the intensity of the degree of light stimulation it receives," said Professor Cindy Lustig, a member of the cognition and aging lab at the University of Michigan. This plays an important role in 'tuning' and keeping track of our circadian clock." This also affects people with cataracts, a common condition that normally affects the older generation. As the disease progresses, blurred spots form on the lens inside the eye. Parthasarathy said, "If a person has cataracts, evening light cannot enter the eyes as much. Therefore, according to the brain, sunset occurs earlier than it actually does." This affects melatonin levels in the body. Melatonin is also known as the sleep hormone and normally starts to increase after sunset. If the presence of cataracts makes the brain think that the sun sets earlier than it actually does, it can cause melatonin levels to rise earlier and make you want to go to sleep earlier.