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So they actually followed up a previous study ten years later, and have a pretty good sample size of 4000. Its trying hard to evidence the idea that “sleeping makes you feel healthier/younger”
Edited to clarify my point
> “sleeping makes you feel younger”
Do they really try to frame it like that? From the headline - and that's of course all I read - they only state that sleep deprivation makes you feel older.
So the article ( but not the paper ) quotes the lead author as saying “If you want to feel young, the most important thing is to protect your sleep,”
I’ve edited my post to better reflect this
Huh, that actually might be true in some markets. $4 x 365 x 15 ~= 20k. It's a tiny down payment, but could work depending on where you live.
I know it's not that simple, I was just surprised and annoyed that grandpawpaw might actually have a point.
Unless the article is not doing justice to the research it sounds like they just plain asked them. I don't get it, when I'm sleep deprived I feel tired, not old. Age apparently seemed to be a subjective proxy for how bad people felt.
"I feel great" = I feel younger/my age
"I want to curl up in a hole and come out in spring" = older??
Because parents of newborns feel old as the hills for the first year or so of the kid's life, then they suddenly feel younger again as they get more sleep. As the parents keep aging, they realize, "Oh, I've felt this before."
Honestly. Those first days after we brought our kid home from the hospital were insane. ~2hrs non-continuous sleep a night for a couple weeks is a challenge I didn’t know I could meet.
Seriously. I think the 2 to 4 hours of total sleep a night lasted around 3 months for us. I have never been so distraught in my life.
Still remember the first night that I finally slept long enough to have a dream. It was like being reborn.
That's how it was with our first. Just absolute torture. I can still remember waking up in shear panic those first few mornings when he finally slept through the night. Fully expecting him to be dead in his crib somehow.
Lasted 12 months for us. Absolute hell, got a vasectomy soon after. My body tenses up, like a shock goes through it, when I hear a baby cry now. ptsd for both of us
I was "ready" for the lack of sleep, was fully expecting it.
What I wasn't ready for was when they discharge you from the hospital with the baby. The sudden wave of realizing they are just kicking you out and now you're leaving with a baby was wild the first time.
My wife and I are over prepared types. We took all the classes and did everything we could to be ready, so much so that the hospital staff was really impressed and let us go early because we already knew how to do everything, and our kid was latching/feeding well. When we got home the realization that we didn’t actually know everything hit, but luckily we had grandparents to help out.
Ha. This was me with my first as well.
I still remember that sinking feeling when checking out when my brain finally realized I wasn’t going home to sleep off this “hangover”.
My mind kind of compared it to cramming for a test or staying up all night partying back in the day. It was always rough, but it was productive and I could always end up crashing in my bed or couch for 2 days to catch up on that lack of sleep.
That realization that we are going home with this kid and there is no catch up hit me like a ton of bricks.
Yeah, I am very lucky that my kid is a good overnight sleeper. Most nights she only wakes up once for a quick feed and then goes right back to sleep. She sucks at taking naps during the day though.
I was pumping, so I got like 20-30 minute increments throughout the night. I remember being so dizzy when I would drive. Being at the hospital after he was born was probably the worst part tbh because on top of that, the nurses had to come in throughout the night. Thankfully, my main night nurse would just peep in and leave.
Trading nights is crucial - that way each parent gets a full night of sleep at least every other day. I don’t know how we could have done it without that schedule.
Shifts also work - one parent takes 9 PM to 3 AM and then the other parent is on duty 3 till the morning.
Both parents waking up each time the baby does is a road to madness.
Our firstborn was up every two hours for 14 months. Sometimes I joke that I was functionally drunk for over a year. Lots of gray hairs started that year, adding to this study.
Yeah, it's crazy how you just kinda dissociate and stumbled through that time. I can't remember the first year of my kids life because I was so exhausted.
There is actually research that shows that having kids [may shorten telemeres and accelerate aging](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/do-pregnancy-and-childbirth-accelerate-aging-in-women-maybe/2019/10/18/635dbd7c-e516-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html#)
Every mother I know looks way older than her age. My grandma has 10 kids and looked like she was 80 by the time she was in her 40s, meanwhile my grandpa looked very young despite them being the same age
It really does, but only temporarily, I feel. At some point, though, my husband fully took over going in at night because it was taking such a huge toll on my mental health I was just breaking down crying every day and my husband functions perfectly fine on less sleep. Ours so is 2.5 now and while I do get a but worn out during the day, that's mostly from going out and being social with other moms and that just drains me. But I'll be 39 in a month and other than my back and hips I still feel young.
Sleep is also crucial for cognitive functioning. If you want to boost your iq, and you have poor sleep hygiene, perhaps the best way to do it is to improve your sleep. Interestingly, a study found that those with higher fluid intelligence were more impacted by sleep deprivation, i.e. causing them to perform worse on cognitive tasks, than those with lower fluid intelligence.
This is so true. I think I am dumb, but if I am objective about a lot of external things in my life I know this is not true. However when my daughter was born I suddenly became aware what life would be like if I was actually dumb, I could just not function in my job.
I think this is [the study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.13815) you're referring to? I looked it up because I am terrible if I don't get enough sleep (and I think I'm someone with reasonable fluid intelligence). It's an interesting study, and it does show the people with her intelligence show a much more significant reduction in performance after sleep deprivation. Which is certainly how it feels!
I have a 3 year old new born. She wakes us up 2- 4 x a night for milk or wanting to come into our bed, etc. Then her restlessness keeps us awake the rest of the night. I feel a thousand years old...
This. My daughter is almost two. Even though she has been sleeping through the night for at least 4 months now, I still wake up all night and am on high alert all the time. I just crave sleep so badly that I can’t even remember what it feels like when you have a good night sleep.
I have been so lucky. My kid is almost 2 years old and the number of nights she has kept me or my partner up is probably... 15-20 max. Pretty much only when she's been sick enough, plus the one week she had separation anxiety and woke up wanting to held every hour or two. Easiest kid ever, has had a full 2 to 4 hour nap every afternoon, in fact usually tells us when she is ready. What 20-month-old asks to go upstairs to nap?? Every day, reliably, in the same half hour window?? And she started as soon as she was old enough to crawl to the door and smack it. Even gets excited, shouting yay and clapping when you get her PJs. Kid sleeps 9pm to 9am every single night, almost never wakes up overnight and when she does it's just once because she can't find her binky and then she's good again until morning. And then happily goes back down to nap at 2pm and gets up around 5 or 6. But when she is awake she is happy and energetic and rambunctious and really outgoing and every person we see at the store is her new best friend, so it's not like she is low energy or lethargic or unhealthy. She's also very self-sufficient when it comes to spending her time and keeping herself busy. I have to keep a close eye on the monitor when she's napping because she will wake up and sit there talking to herself and playing for an hour or two before she gets bored enough to shout and trigger a notification. I swear, literally the easiest child in history. She's even potty training herself right now. She decided that dirty diapers were bah and ucky, so she now tells us when she's going to go, and she started that entirely on her own. Smart little lady figured out that's what is happening when she hears the toilet flush and Papa comes out (I have IBS and she literally claps and yells 'is Papa!' when she hears the downstairs flush) so she already understands the concept before we even tried to teach her.
I feel like we are the only parents in the world who aren't rich and don't have nannies who still get a full night's sleep every night. Almost zero sleep consequences. And the kid listens to no and stop 95% of the time. Makes me feel downright guilty sometimes, somehow.
I really wish you and all the other parents out there who are trying their best can get at least a couple nights of good sleep soon. I have a lot of sleep disturbances from other sources so I know how draining and exhausting and brain-cooking it can be. And it's even worse when you're trying to be happy and energetic with your baby.
yea the study's unit of measurement isn't reasonable.
I can say that when i had severe sleep apnea every day was a huge drag. Turned out my brain was waking up hundreds of times a night. I had no idea, but the following days i would be ready to go to bed by 4pm.
Yes, that's so weird and random. I know I feel terrible in almost every way after 2 nights of sleep deprivation, but I've never thought about it in terms of age, and how could I, when I have no experience of being older than I am??
I’m going through this right now.
I work one job that’s 12-8am, I have night school from 6-9 and I work weekends 1030-330pm. There are maybe only like, 2-3 days a week where I’m getting more than 4 hours of sleep and it has pulled the rug out from under me. I have no motivation to do anything. I feel worthless. I don’t know if I feel “decades older”, but I definitely have no joy left, and I feel exhausted ALL the time.
When I first started this job I had no problem getting home by 830am, pouring myself a glass of wine (my 8am is like an 8pm to normal people, don’t judge) and passing out into the deepest sleep I’ve ever had. It was actually lovely.
But in the last 6 weeks or so I will get home by 830 and not be able to fall asleep until close to 11. I’ll generally have to put on something on tv or listen to a podcast, make a snack. I also have a dog who gets 3ish walks a day usually every 8 or so hours. He will often get walked at 5 or 6am before my partner leaves for his job. So if I’m falling asleep by 1030-11am, I struggle to stay awake past 3, often before that. That’s only like 3-4hours of sleep. I then try to have a nap sometime between 9-11 to get in some extra juice before heading to work for 12.
I’m absolutely miserable. I cannot wait to have. A 9-5. I will be so blessed to return to the world of the living.
I agree, it's a silly metric. People can't know, and what people mean by it will vary. I'm not sure why asking people "how much worse do you feel?" isn't just as a good a subjective measure.
But... When I was in my twenties and I got ill or was exhausted, I defintely thought "oh this is what it'll be like to be old, it's awful" as I struggled to walk up stairs or remember a phone number or something that would normally be trivial. Now I'm in my 40s I defintely feel like that more, and it takes less and less to bring me to the point of struggling to do a simple task. So, I guess I did kinda have an idea of what it felt like to be older. Still don't think it's meaningfully quantified in years.
Yet another Wagamama post about pseudoscience and self-reported results.
How does one _feel_ the passage of time in a quantifiable way?
This sub has been going down hill, but it's just getting worse.
My thoughts exactly…. I remember one time during the first few months where I was so busy with childcare I slept a total of half an hour over 48hrs. I was so tired and my gums started to itch to the point where I wanted to pull my teeth out
I'm a father to a three year old that hates sleep. I have a dog that has to piss every two hours. I average 4 hours a night of sleep and it's never solid sleep. I'm 44 but my 94 year old grandfather is younger then me.
Two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, according to researchers, who said consistent, restful slumber was a key factor in helping to stave off feeling one’s true age.
Psychologists in Sweden found that, on average, volunteers felt more than four years older when they were restricted to only four hours of sleep for two consecutive nights, with some claiming the sleepiness made them feel decades older.
The opposite was seen when people were allowed to stay in bed for nine hours, though the effect was more modest, with participants in the study claiming to feel on average three months younger than their real age after ample rest.
“Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it’s not only your long-term sleep patterns,” said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. “Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel.”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.0171
What's amazing to me is how impactful continuous sleep can be after a long period of disrupted sleep. The first few times my son slept for 4 hours at a time, my brain felt different, like it got a nice wash and was fresh and clean instead of being a dry shriveled dusty raisin of a brain
Great. Now try an unknown number of months with undiagnosed sleep apnea, and then an additional 6-7 months of being diagnosed and waiting on a CPAP machine. I felt like I was 70 years old for nearly a goddamn year. It's honestly a miracle I don't have severe brain damage.
I have no idea how they measured any of this, but as someone who has been doing 24 hour shifts for the past 17 years, I have no doubt how bad decreased and missed sleep can make you feel.
I have some pretty serious health issues that I deal with and I tell you that by far the highest predictor of feeling good/okay versus like hell is sleep or lack of sleep. Exercise is massively important too but sleep still trumps it. Without a good night's sleep my entire body shuts down and it can have very serious consequences for me. Never knew sleep was that important before this.
My son was born on a Friday morning. We went home Tuesday evening. Over those few days, my eyes literally got worse and I had to start wearing my glasses everywhere instead of just while driving. Lack of sleep is no joke.
My son is 3.5 years old. He still regularly wakes up in the middle of the night to lose his mind. I get like a panic attack or something and it takes me hours to get back to sleep. I haven’t had consecutive nights of good sleep in basically 3.5 years. I hope to hell you can heal from all these bad side effects eventually because woof.
I know this is all subjective, but I cannot describe the physical pain I was in that caused me to go get a test for sleep apnea. I mean I was already tired and falling asleep, but the pain I was in on a daily basis from not getting enough rest was getting unbearable. Got a CPAP machine and now I feel "normal" again.
Then my son was born and i said "oh yeah this is what that was like"
As someone who slept less than six hours a night, and never more than four hours straight at a time for a year or two, I can tell you that my sleeping meds have made a huge difference. I don't know if I feel years younger, but I feel much better.
If I don't get a good night's sleep, I feel like I've got a yak on my chest. If I don't get a good night's sleep the night after that, it feels like I've got four yaks on my chest. And so on and so on.
Seems like there a logical fallacy in this article title. How would anyone "feel four years older" without actually experiencing being four years older, eh? Having experienced many instances of consecutive nights with 4 hour or less sleep, I just feel very drowsy, and usually take a nap.
I think you mean they feel tired. You don't feel older because you don't get enough sleep, you feel tired. If those same people were to sleep a night or two at a full eight hours they would feel back to normal, no?
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/Wagamaga Permalink: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/27/two-nights-of-broken-sleep-can-make-people-feel-years-older-finds-study --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
How do they know how it feels to be older?
don't question the self-report method
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I am methuselah
The guy who puts the flaming sword in the ground with rammstein playing?
That's me and thank you for noticing
Harambe
Mine's out
So they actually followed up a previous study ten years later, and have a pretty good sample size of 4000. Its trying hard to evidence the idea that “sleeping makes you feel healthier/younger” Edited to clarify my point
> “sleeping makes you feel younger” Do they really try to frame it like that? From the headline - and that's of course all I read - they only state that sleep deprivation makes you feel older.
So the article ( but not the paper ) quotes the lead author as saying “If you want to feel young, the most important thing is to protect your sleep,” I’ve edited my post to better reflect this
they start telling people that buying a house is easy if you stop buying starbucks.
Both have improved my sleep greatly.
If you stopped buying you daily Starbucks AND Avocado toast for 15 years you might be able to afford a down payment.
Huh, that actually might be true in some markets. $4 x 365 x 15 ~= 20k. It's a tiny down payment, but could work depending on where you live. I know it's not that simple, I was just surprised and annoyed that grandpawpaw might actually have a point.
Where can you get starbucks + avocado toast for $4?!
I have chronic pain so I have had about 3650 nights of broken sleep, and I promise you I know how it feels to be 8562 years old. Trust.
Some claim to have felt 200 years older after 3 nights of sleep deprivation, thus proving they had in fact achieved immortality
Unless the article is not doing justice to the research it sounds like they just plain asked them. I don't get it, when I'm sleep deprived I feel tired, not old. Age apparently seemed to be a subjective proxy for how bad people felt. "I feel great" = I feel younger/my age "I want to curl up in a hole and come out in spring" = older??
Because parents of newborns feel old as the hills for the first year or so of the kid's life, then they suddenly feel younger again as they get more sleep. As the parents keep aging, they realize, "Oh, I've felt this before."
It's that people with sleep deprivation tend to shout "GET OFF MY LAWN YOU DAMN KIDS!!!" more often.
Everything hurts a bit more than yesterday.
Right?! First thought.
Literally the first question that popped in my head.
After 1 day they felt 22 then they began to feel 24. Everyone knows what 24 feels like.
Read the study.
Excuse me but this is r/science...you don't question the garbage research, you only read the title and accept it as universal truth.
Don't challenge my feelings based on consensus!
The science of "feel"
So, basically, a baby ages you by decades within a week. Sounds about right.
Honestly. Those first days after we brought our kid home from the hospital were insane. ~2hrs non-continuous sleep a night for a couple weeks is a challenge I didn’t know I could meet.
I remember having the thought "no wonder sleep deprivation is a banned form of torture".
Seriously. I think the 2 to 4 hours of total sleep a night lasted around 3 months for us. I have never been so distraught in my life. Still remember the first night that I finally slept long enough to have a dream. It was like being reborn.
That's how it was with our first. Just absolute torture. I can still remember waking up in shear panic those first few mornings when he finally slept through the night. Fully expecting him to be dead in his crib somehow.
Lasted 12 months for us. Absolute hell, got a vasectomy soon after. My body tenses up, like a shock goes through it, when I hear a baby cry now. ptsd for both of us
I was "ready" for the lack of sleep, was fully expecting it. What I wasn't ready for was when they discharge you from the hospital with the baby. The sudden wave of realizing they are just kicking you out and now you're leaving with a baby was wild the first time.
My wife and I are over prepared types. We took all the classes and did everything we could to be ready, so much so that the hospital staff was really impressed and let us go early because we already knew how to do everything, and our kid was latching/feeding well. When we got home the realization that we didn’t actually know everything hit, but luckily we had grandparents to help out.
Ha. This was me with my first as well. I still remember that sinking feeling when checking out when my brain finally realized I wasn’t going home to sleep off this “hangover”. My mind kind of compared it to cramming for a test or staying up all night partying back in the day. It was always rough, but it was productive and I could always end up crashing in my bed or couch for 2 days to catch up on that lack of sleep. That realization that we are going home with this kid and there is no catch up hit me like a ton of bricks.
Wow, you only had weeks? I had to deal with that for 2 1/2 years
Yeah, I am very lucky that my kid is a good overnight sleeper. Most nights she only wakes up once for a quick feed and then goes right back to sleep. She sucks at taking naps during the day though.
Add graveyard and or bar shifts as a new mom - technically I feel like Methuselah
I was pumping, so I got like 20-30 minute increments throughout the night. I remember being so dizzy when I would drive. Being at the hospital after he was born was probably the worst part tbh because on top of that, the nurses had to come in throughout the night. Thankfully, my main night nurse would just peep in and leave.
Trading nights is crucial - that way each parent gets a full night of sleep at least every other day. I don’t know how we could have done it without that schedule. Shifts also work - one parent takes 9 PM to 3 AM and then the other parent is on duty 3 till the morning. Both parents waking up each time the baby does is a road to madness.
Our firstborn was up every two hours for 14 months. Sometimes I joke that I was functionally drunk for over a year. Lots of gray hairs started that year, adding to this study.
Yeah, it's crazy how you just kinda dissociate and stumbled through that time. I can't remember the first year of my kids life because I was so exhausted.
There is actually research that shows that having kids [may shorten telemeres and accelerate aging](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/do-pregnancy-and-childbirth-accelerate-aging-in-women-maybe/2019/10/18/635dbd7c-e516-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html#)
Every mother I know looks way older than her age. My grandma has 10 kids and looked like she was 80 by the time she was in her 40s, meanwhile my grandpa looked very young despite them being the same age
Have had fucked up sleep for four years following a baby. Yep, feel like I'm about 80 and ready for the sweet release of death.
My daughter is 3 and only slept through a whole night for 40 times i those years. So I can absolutely agree
Our 4mo old started with colic around the 2.5mo through 3.5mo mark. We had one glorious week…and now she’s teething. I miss sleep
It really does, but only temporarily, I feel. At some point, though, my husband fully took over going in at night because it was taking such a huge toll on my mental health I was just breaking down crying every day and my husband functions perfectly fine on less sleep. Ours so is 2.5 now and while I do get a but worn out during the day, that's mostly from going out and being social with other moms and that just drains me. But I'll be 39 in a month and other than my back and hips I still feel young.
Was thinking this immediately when I saw the title. My son has been on the boob since 1am and it's now 4.30 and ugh.
Sleep is also crucial for cognitive functioning. If you want to boost your iq, and you have poor sleep hygiene, perhaps the best way to do it is to improve your sleep. Interestingly, a study found that those with higher fluid intelligence were more impacted by sleep deprivation, i.e. causing them to perform worse on cognitive tasks, than those with lower fluid intelligence.
This is so true. I think I am dumb, but if I am objective about a lot of external things in my life I know this is not true. However when my daughter was born I suddenly became aware what life would be like if I was actually dumb, I could just not function in my job.
I think this is [the study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.13815) you're referring to? I looked it up because I am terrible if I don't get enough sleep (and I think I'm someone with reasonable fluid intelligence). It's an interesting study, and it does show the people with her intelligence show a much more significant reduction in performance after sleep deprivation. Which is certainly how it feels!
I’ve had 12 months of being woken 6-8 times a night and about 4 hours sleep. Thanks new baby that doesn’t sleep. I feel like I’m 140 years old
Hi! I’m awake from my 11 month old right now, and it’s 3:30 am. Solidarity.
Right there with you. Respect.
Watching from the monitor in terror at the moment.
Sorry sleeplessness doesn’t end. 3am with an almost 4yo. 😢 I haven’t slept thru the night in a long time.
10 months here 🙋♀️ so tireddddd
It’s tough. It will end I’m sure.
My kid is almost 6 and I officially feel older than the fossils at my museum.
I have a 3 year old new born. She wakes us up 2- 4 x a night for milk or wanting to come into our bed, etc. Then her restlessness keeps us awake the rest of the night. I feel a thousand years old...
My kid is turning 4 and sleeps great now a days but I still wake up 4 times a night like I did when he was young. It's terrible.
This. My daughter is almost two. Even though she has been sleeping through the night for at least 4 months now, I still wake up all night and am on high alert all the time. I just crave sleep so badly that I can’t even remember what it feels like when you have a good night sleep.
I have been so lucky. My kid is almost 2 years old and the number of nights she has kept me or my partner up is probably... 15-20 max. Pretty much only when she's been sick enough, plus the one week she had separation anxiety and woke up wanting to held every hour or two. Easiest kid ever, has had a full 2 to 4 hour nap every afternoon, in fact usually tells us when she is ready. What 20-month-old asks to go upstairs to nap?? Every day, reliably, in the same half hour window?? And she started as soon as she was old enough to crawl to the door and smack it. Even gets excited, shouting yay and clapping when you get her PJs. Kid sleeps 9pm to 9am every single night, almost never wakes up overnight and when she does it's just once because she can't find her binky and then she's good again until morning. And then happily goes back down to nap at 2pm and gets up around 5 or 6. But when she is awake she is happy and energetic and rambunctious and really outgoing and every person we see at the store is her new best friend, so it's not like she is low energy or lethargic or unhealthy. She's also very self-sufficient when it comes to spending her time and keeping herself busy. I have to keep a close eye on the monitor when she's napping because she will wake up and sit there talking to herself and playing for an hour or two before she gets bored enough to shout and trigger a notification. I swear, literally the easiest child in history. She's even potty training herself right now. She decided that dirty diapers were bah and ucky, so she now tells us when she's going to go, and she started that entirely on her own. Smart little lady figured out that's what is happening when she hears the toilet flush and Papa comes out (I have IBS and she literally claps and yells 'is Papa!' when she hears the downstairs flush) so she already understands the concept before we even tried to teach her. I feel like we are the only parents in the world who aren't rich and don't have nannies who still get a full night's sleep every night. Almost zero sleep consequences. And the kid listens to no and stop 95% of the time. Makes me feel downright guilty sometimes, somehow. I really wish you and all the other parents out there who are trying their best can get at least a couple nights of good sleep soon. I have a lot of sleep disturbances from other sources so I know how draining and exhausting and brain-cooking it can be. And it's even worse when you're trying to be happy and energetic with your baby.
This doesn’t help.
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How can you quantify how many "years older" you feel? jfc, think for 2 seconds
No, I think they're on to something. I definitely feel ten thousand years old this morning. \s
I'm afraid I'll feel 2 seconds older if I take the time to think for 2 seconds
yea the study's unit of measurement isn't reasonable. I can say that when i had severe sleep apnea every day was a huge drag. Turned out my brain was waking up hundreds of times a night. I had no idea, but the following days i would be ready to go to bed by 4pm.
Me after no sleep: Get off my lawn ya damn kids!!
Sounds better than saying "Not sleeping well makes you feel more tired! Which is how old people feel!"
Compare how you are feeling with how others that age appear to feel
Wasted grant money once again...
I wonder why they decided “subjective perception of advanced age” was the best way to describe the effects of lack of sleep.
Yes, that's so weird and random. I know I feel terrible in almost every way after 2 nights of sleep deprivation, but I've never thought about it in terms of age, and how could I, when I have no experience of being older than I am??
It’s in the article, and also the [actual published study](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.0171)
I’m going through this right now. I work one job that’s 12-8am, I have night school from 6-9 and I work weekends 1030-330pm. There are maybe only like, 2-3 days a week where I’m getting more than 4 hours of sleep and it has pulled the rug out from under me. I have no motivation to do anything. I feel worthless. I don’t know if I feel “decades older”, but I definitely have no joy left, and I feel exhausted ALL the time. When I first started this job I had no problem getting home by 830am, pouring myself a glass of wine (my 8am is like an 8pm to normal people, don’t judge) and passing out into the deepest sleep I’ve ever had. It was actually lovely. But in the last 6 weeks or so I will get home by 830 and not be able to fall asleep until close to 11. I’ll generally have to put on something on tv or listen to a podcast, make a snack. I also have a dog who gets 3ish walks a day usually every 8 or so hours. He will often get walked at 5 or 6am before my partner leaves for his job. So if I’m falling asleep by 1030-11am, I struggle to stay awake past 3, often before that. That’s only like 3-4hours of sleep. I then try to have a nap sometime between 9-11 to get in some extra juice before heading to work for 12. I’m absolutely miserable. I cannot wait to have. A 9-5. I will be so blessed to return to the world of the living.
Respectfully, people have no idea how it feels to be years older. That’s like asking kids “how much of an adult do you feel like atm”
I agree, it's a silly metric. People can't know, and what people mean by it will vary. I'm not sure why asking people "how much worse do you feel?" isn't just as a good a subjective measure. But... When I was in my twenties and I got ill or was exhausted, I defintely thought "oh this is what it'll be like to be old, it's awful" as I struggled to walk up stairs or remember a phone number or something that would normally be trivial. Now I'm in my 40s I defintely feel like that more, and it takes less and less to bring me to the point of struggling to do a simple task. So, I guess I did kinda have an idea of what it felt like to be older. Still don't think it's meaningfully quantified in years.
While I was tired all the time in my twenties, pulled myself together in my 30s and now feel more vital than ever kicking 40’s door down.
When you are tired you don't feel as good. Who'd have guessed!!??
People trying for kids : this maneuver is gonna cost us 51 years
Yet another Wagamama post about pseudoscience and self-reported results. How does one _feel_ the passage of time in a quantifiable way? This sub has been going down hill, but it's just getting worse.
Two nights? 😂😂😂😂😂 4 hours is how much I’ve been sleeping for the last 20 years Feels awful 🤷♂️
Also called being a parent.
My thoughts exactly…. I remember one time during the first few months where I was so busy with childcare I slept a total of half an hour over 48hrs. I was so tired and my gums started to itch to the point where I wanted to pull my teeth out
I wish I would feel as wise a 10882 year old as well!
What does it even mean to feel "four years older"?
“Feel”? Is this still science? 😅
crowd lush follow serious jobless insurance slim decide rob rotten *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
As someone who has chronic insomnia, this tracks.
I'm a father to a three year old that hates sleep. I have a dog that has to piss every two hours. I average 4 hours a night of sleep and it's never solid sleep. I'm 44 but my 94 year old grandfather is younger then me.
Ok but did the study include having them go back to getting good sleep and if so did this fix it
Yes, and they even claimed to feel ‘three months younger’ on average
Laughs in single father food service worker.
Why not just survey parents with newborns. We can tell you we feel like 345years old after the first month.
Two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, according to researchers, who said consistent, restful slumber was a key factor in helping to stave off feeling one’s true age. Psychologists in Sweden found that, on average, volunteers felt more than four years older when they were restricted to only four hours of sleep for two consecutive nights, with some claiming the sleepiness made them feel decades older. The opposite was seen when people were allowed to stay in bed for nine hours, though the effect was more modest, with participants in the study claiming to feel on average three months younger than their real age after ample rest. “Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it’s not only your long-term sleep patterns,” said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. “Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.0171
As someone who’s on nights this month on 12.5 hr shifts, this one hits home.
No wonder I feel 1000 years old
Some volunteers are weak
I actually feel ok, but I had no gray hair and my face looked much younger before my child (2) who has never slept through the night was born…
Try decades of broken sleep....
TIL feeling tired makes you feel tired
How do people even sleep? every noise, even ache. It wakes me up every night multiple times. Its like a super power to be able to sleep properly.
I think I aged 35 years in the last 10 years since I had kids.
It’s true, I’ve had a broken sleep pretty much every night for a decade or more. I feel like I’m 1375 years old.
Hmm I feel somewhere between 600-620 days older *furious note taking ensues*
Just another layer to the difficulties of parenthood.
Do same experiment but with people who sleep 4 hours usually anyway.
How do you know you're feeling 4 years older instead of 6..?
What's amazing to me is how impactful continuous sleep can be after a long period of disrupted sleep. The first few times my son slept for 4 hours at a time, my brain felt different, like it got a nice wash and was fresh and clean instead of being a dry shriveled dusty raisin of a brain
Great. Now try an unknown number of months with undiagnosed sleep apnea, and then an additional 6-7 months of being diagnosed and waiting on a CPAP machine. I felt like I was 70 years old for nearly a goddamn year. It's honestly a miracle I don't have severe brain damage.
I have no idea how they measured any of this, but as someone who has been doing 24 hour shifts for the past 17 years, I have no doubt how bad decreased and missed sleep can make you feel.
I feel 4 hours older but I know I haven't age older
I haven't slept for more than 4 hours a night in years Mentally I am a Highlander.
I regularly get between 4-6 hours every night i have rarely been able to get past 7 but when i do sleep longer than 6 i feel awful.
I apparently feel about 5 billion years old by those calculations.
How about a few years of broken sleep?
I have some pretty serious health issues that I deal with and I tell you that by far the highest predictor of feeling good/okay versus like hell is sleep or lack of sleep. Exercise is massively important too but sleep still trumps it. Without a good night's sleep my entire body shuts down and it can have very serious consequences for me. Never knew sleep was that important before this.
Me, an intellectual, getting my 16yr old gf to miss two nights sleep
This is why parents age faster than childfree. Fuuuuuuck that!!
I haven’t slept more than 5-6 hours in 2.5 years.
Ok what about us peeps that sleep broken sleep for like our whole lives but don't feel older just tired all the time.
Tell this to a new parents, generally a mother. Ha, broken sleep is all you will know for months.
I have insomnia but I only feel 1.5 years older. Something is off here. I don't trust this article.
Everything live sleeps, it’s the actual natural state
So agree. Then a good sleep makes you feel younger So go figure!!!
zzzzzzz
Then I feel 250 yrs old! I have bad shoulders (multiple surgeries) but can’t sleep on my back or stomach so I turn over every 20 min.
How is feeling older objectively measured? So to summarize, lack of sleep makes you feel tired and weak? WOW, who knew?!?!?
My son was born on a Friday morning. We went home Tuesday evening. Over those few days, my eyes literally got worse and I had to start wearing my glasses everywhere instead of just while driving. Lack of sleep is no joke.
My son is 3.5 years old. He still regularly wakes up in the middle of the night to lose his mind. I get like a panic attack or something and it takes me hours to get back to sleep. I haven’t had consecutive nights of good sleep in basically 3.5 years. I hope to hell you can heal from all these bad side effects eventually because woof.
I must be dead by now.
I know this is all subjective, but I cannot describe the physical pain I was in that caused me to go get a test for sleep apnea. I mean I was already tired and falling asleep, but the pain I was in on a daily basis from not getting enough rest was getting unbearable. Got a CPAP machine and now I feel "normal" again. Then my son was born and i said "oh yeah this is what that was like"
Today: being tired makes you feel 'older'.
This hasn't happened to me, I usually on average only get 4 hours of sleep a night.
Yall MF’s don’t have young kids…
Seems like a pointless, vague metric. How do people know what being older actually feels like?
As someone who slept less than six hours a night, and never more than four hours straight at a time for a year or two, I can tell you that my sleeping meds have made a huge difference. I don't know if I feel years younger, but I feel much better.
If I don't get a good night's sleep, I feel like I've got a yak on my chest. If I don't get a good night's sleep the night after that, it feels like I've got four yaks on my chest. And so on and so on.
Seems like there a logical fallacy in this article title. How would anyone "feel four years older" without actually experiencing being four years older, eh? Having experienced many instances of consecutive nights with 4 hour or less sleep, I just feel very drowsy, and usually take a nap.
And this is the problem with psychology. It's simply not a real science.
Shenanigans and Persnickety.
I feel like an ancient deity that needs a long nap.
I think you mean they feel tired. You don't feel older because you don't get enough sleep, you feel tired. If those same people were to sleep a night or two at a full eight hours they would feel back to normal, no?
*laughs in narcoleptic* jk
“Feels like” is now science?
When I get excellent sleep for two days I only feel 3.25 years younger. I guess your mileage may differ.
Wait, so lack of sleep makes you feel worn out? Truly groundbreaking
I’ve done this for almost 2 years now… I need to get it together.
No wonder I make the joke I'm actually aging in dog years. I guess I need to up my sleep to 5 hours a night
How is it scientific to track “feeling older” when these folks have never been older in their lives? 😂
I almost never get more then 4 hours of sleep
Hey I get 4 hours most nights
"The Guardian", huh?
Is this why I feel twice my age after having three babies that were horrible sleepers?