How Much Sleep Past 60?

An old wives' tale has it that people pass 60 they need less sleep; a standard medical textbook known all doctors as "Best and Taylor"* solemnly avers that such elders need five to seven hours. Where do the medical authorities get such information? Probably from the old wives' tale, suggests Dr. Philip M. Tiller Jr. of New Orleans: so far as he can tell, there are no data to support the statement. And judging from his patients, it just isn't so.

Dr. Tiller studied 83 mentally alert and physically active office patients, all 60 or older. When he divided them up by how much sleep they said they got, it turned out that those with the fewest complaints were those who slept eight hours or more, and most often those who also took an afternoon nap. Those who slept seven hours and less had the most complaints -- vague tension, nervousness, lethargy and exhaustion.

In the Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. Tiller reports that he prescribed the simplest possible remedy: more sleep.

With no sleeping pills (which he thinks often aggravate the problem), his patients were to rest in bed for nine to ten hours each night and one to two hours in the afternoon. Reading and watching TV were not rated as rest.

For the first week or two, a few of the short sleepers felt worse on enforced rest, but within a month virtually all were getting eight hours of sleep or more, just as Dr. Tiller prescribed. They were more relaxed, had fewer complaints, and were less prone to become apprehensive, dizzy or confused. Some of the tensions of the aged, Dr. Tiller concludes, may be due to something as simple and obvious as "a long-standing deficit of rest, sleep or both."

-The Physiological Basis of Medical Practice, by C. H. Best and N. B. Taylor, first published in 1937 and now in its seventh edition (Williams and Wilkins).

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