Why does my sleep change as I get older?

You used to sleep through the night, and now the morning comes before you’re ready for it. You’ve been told, by friends and even by a doctor, that it’s your age. Does that mean nothing can be done? Or could the people who keep saying “age” be missing something?

Some of it is, and it’s worth knowing which part. If you find you’re sleepy earlier in the evening, awake earlier in the morning, a little slower to drop off and more easily woken by a noise in the street, you’re describing the familiar shape sleep takes in later life, with more brief wakings in the night as well¹1 Mander et al., 2017. Across adult life sleep grows a little shorter and lighter, with less deep sleep and more time awake after first dropping off²2 Ohayon et al., 2004. None of this on its own is a sign that something is wrong.

Does it keep getting worse from here? Researchers who gathered dozens of overnight sleep studiessleep study A night with sensors recording your breathing, brain waves, heart and movements as you sleep, in a sleep clinic or sometimes at home, to see what's happening in your sleep. of healthy volunteers found that most of the change had already happened by around 60². After that, only one thing kept falling: how much of the time in bed was spent asleep². People of the same age differ a great deal too, and some older adults sleep much as they did decades before while others change a lot¹.

So the years change the shape of sleep more than they take it away. If your nights have worsened clearly or suddenly, though, they’re telling you about more than the calendar.

Awake at four with nothing yet begun, and by nine in the evening the armchair has you. The two ends of that day are connected. In healthy volunteers living at home, the older people went to bed about an hour and a half earlier than younger adults, and woke nearly two hours earlier³3 Klerman & Dijk, 2008, so their whole night had slid earlier.

Lab work suggests why the morning comes so soon. Through the day sleep pressuresleep pressure The body’s need for sleep, which builds the longer we stay awake and eases while we sleep. builds, and through the night it drains away. By the early hours most of it is spent, and it’s the body clockbody clock The timekeeper in your brain that runs on a cycle of about a day, setting when you feel sleepy and when you feel alert. Daylight, especially in the morning, keeps it in step with the clock on the wall. that keeps you asleep until morning. In older people both signals are weaker, so sleep in the second half of the night breaks up sooner and waking comes earlier⁴4 Dijk et al., 1999.

At the other end of the day, the lift in alertness that keeps younger people going through the evening seems to fade with age, and the clock itself may lose some of its cells over the years¹1 Mander et al., 2017. That may be why the armchair grows so hard to resist at nine. Sleep still comes, then. It comes at hours you didn’t choose, early in the evening and over before dawn. There’s more on this in why you might wake too early and how the body clock decides when you’re sleepy.

If you’ve tried going to bed earlier, or staying in bed longer to catch up, you may have found the extra hours filling up with lying awake. Why would more time in bed bring more waking? The same volunteers offer a clue. The 18 older people among them usually spent about eight hours in bed at home, and when their sleep was measured in the lab they slept about six and a half³3 Klerman & Dijk, 2008. That leaves an hour and a half or so of lying awake, spread through the night. The researchers suggest that choosing more time in bed than the sleep your body now makes may itself feed the sense of waking in the night and waking too early³.

Once there’s no alarm, the mornings can stretch out, and it can feel like a failure when sleep doesn’t fill them. On average, though, retiring made sleep a little easier. In a large French study that followed people for years either side of retiring, the odds of reporting disturbed sleep fell by about a quarter once they stopped work⁶6 Vahtera et al., 2009. It went the other way for people who retired because of ill health, whose sleep got worse⁶.

That study asked how people slept, and didn’t count the hours spent lying awake in bed. If your mornings in bed have stretched since the alarm stopped, a steady time for getting up is one way to bring them back toward the sleep you get.

Some nights the waking has a cause of its own: an ache in a hip, a full bladder, a new medicine, a snore loud enough to rouse you. Things like these grow more common over the years: sleep disorders, medicines, getting up to pass urine, long-term pain, hormonal changes, low mood and other illnesses¹⁷1 Mander et al., 20177 Foley et al., 2004. Friends, a doctor or you yourself can easily put them down to age. Yet when researchers screened volunteers carefully for illness, medicines, alcohol and sleep apneasleep apnea A condition in which the throat repeatedly narrows or closes during sleep, briefly stopping or reducing breathing. Loud snoring, gasping and daytime sleepiness are common signs., the differences between young and old shrank, and some disappeared altogether²2 Ohayon et al., 2004. Researchers who surveyed older Americans came to a similar view, that older people’s sleep complaints are often about their health more than their age⁷. So if your nights have got worse, it’s worth looking past the years, because much of what gets put down to age can be helped. Some of it is a doctor’s to find: the ache, the bladder, the medicine, the snore. Some of it you can change yourself, like hours in bed that run past the sleep you make, or a long doze in the chair.

Getting up in the night to pass urine, which doctors call nocturianocturia Waking from sleep once or more in the night to pass urine. It’s common in both men and women, and becomes more common with age., is so ordinary that people stop mentioning it. About half of people in their sixties do it⁸8 Duffy et al., 2016, and each trip can leave you lying awake afterwards. The trips can have more than one cause. Several medicines often prescribed in later life, diuretics (water pills) most of all, can add to them⁸. And some researchers think lighter sleep wakes people first, so that they get up because they’re already awake⁸.

If your sleep changed after you started a new medicine, or you take several, it’s worth asking your doctor or pharmacist to look at them together for effects on sleep and nighttime trips to the bathroom. The other things on that list have pages of their own: restless legs, sleep apnea and insomnia.

You could keep a steady time for getting up, even after a poor night, and skip the earlier bedtimes and lie-ins meant to make up for it. That way your hours in bed drift back toward the sleep you really get. Going by the gap between about eight hours in bed and six and a half asleep³3 Klerman & Dijk, 2008 in those healthy older volunteers, what you give up is mostly time awake in the dark. Doctors call this matching of time in bed to the hours you’re asleep sleep restrictionsleep restriction A part of CBT for insomnia that limits time in bed to about the amount of sleep you're getting at the moment, then widens it as sleep becomes more solid. It's usually guided by a clinician or a tested program., and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine suggests it as a treatment in its own right⁹9 Edinger et al., 2021. Cutting below the sleep you already get is a different matter, and it’s best done with a CBT-I therapist or a doctor, as part of CBT for insomniaCBT for insomnia Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia: a short course of practical, talking-based techniques that help retrain sleep. It’s the first treatment doctors recommend for long-term insomnia.. In the early weeks a shorter night in bed can bring more sleepiness in the day, which in the guideline authors’ experience usually passes as sleep improves¹⁰10 Edinger et al., 2021b, and if it doesn’t, they’ll help you ease off.

If the nights have been hard for a while, CBT for insomnia is the treatment the same academy strongly recommends for adults with long-running insomnia⁹. Researchers pooled trials of behavioral treatments for insomnia, CBT for insomnia among them, and compared older and middle-aged people who’d been through them, and the people over 55 improved just as much, falling asleep sooner and lying awake less in the night¹¹11 Irwin et al., 2006. So whatever you’ve been told about your age, it hasn’t put this treatment out of reach. Pain or illness doesn’t either: in trials of adults of all ages, it helped people living with chronic pain, cancer or the after-effects of a stroke too, and side effects were rare¹²12 Scott et al., 2025. Wondering what it would mean in practice? There’s a page on what CBT for insomnia would ask of you.

Naps grow more common with age, and about half of them happen without being planned¹1 Mander et al., 2017. If you nap, the afternoon is the time researchers have tested. In a small lab study they gave healthy people aged 55 to 85, who already slept well, an afternoon nap, and it barely touched that night’s sleep¹³13 Campbell et al., 2005. It added to the day’s total, and they performed better the next day¹³. That study only tried afternoon naps¹³, so a short nap earlier in the day is the safer bet, since a long doze late in the evening uses up the sleep pressure the night needs. If your whole night has moved earlier, you could try sitting somewhere bright in those evening hours in place of the doze in the armchair. There’s more in whether naps are good for you.

Moving your body helps too. In trials with middle-aged and older adults, regular exercise tended to improve how well people felt they slept, with aerobic exercise ranking best for overall sleep quality and yoga for how long and how efficiently they slept¹⁴14 Gao et al., 2024. If brisk exercise is hard on stiff joints, yoga is worth a try, given where it ranked for those longer, fuller nights.

The nights of later life have their own shape, earlier and lighter and with more brief wakings. Within it there’s still room to sleep well, with a getting-up time you keep, hours in bed that match the sleep you get, and help for whatever else is waking you. And on the mornings you’re up before everyone else, there’s the first light at the window, and the cup in your hands while the house still sleeps.