Sleeping well “rejuvenates” –

One of the effects of devoting enough hours to sleep is that people feel they are younger than their real age.

NEW YORK (HealthDay News)—A good night’s sleep can make you feel years younger, while a bad night’s sleep will leave you stumbling around like an old man, a new study shows.

Sleeping well enough to feel very sharp when you wake up is associated with feeling four years younger than your actual age, researchers found.

On the other hand, extreme sleepiness makes a person feel six years older than they really are, the results show.

“This means that going from feeling alert to drowsy added a surprising 10 years to how old you felt,” said researcher Leonie Balter of the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University.

For this study, researchers first surveyed 429 people ages 18 to 70 regarding how old they felt, how much they slept, and how sleepy they were.

The survey results showed that for every night a person didn’t get enough sleep, they felt regarding three months older than they really were, on average.

Based on this, researchers designed an experiment to test whether getting a good night’s sleep might make someone feel young and vibrant.

Previous work has found that feeling younger than your actual age is associated with living a longer, healthier life, and there is even evidence that those who feel younger have younger brains.

“Since sleep is essential for brain function and overall well-being, we decided to test whether sleep has any secrets to preserving a youthful sense of age,” Balter explained.

186 people aged 18 to 46 participated in the experiment. Participants were asked to restrict their sleep to just four hours in bed over two nights, and at another time they were asked to sleep nine hours in bed over two nights.

After a pair of four-hour nights, participants felt 4.4 years older, on average, than when they got enough sleep, the researchers report.

The new study appears in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.”

“Safeguarding our sleep is crucial to maintaining a youthful feeling,” Balter stressed.

“This, in turn, can promote a more active lifestyle and health-promoting behaviors, as both feeling young and alert are important to our motivation to be active.”