Why can’t We sleep?

We all know we should get enough sleep. But as we get older, we sleep less and less and frequently sleep badly.

And chronic sleep deprivation can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia and staying awake at night worrying about chronic sleep deprivation. Lack of adequate sleep can contribute to increased risk of heart disease and serial yawning during presentations on exchange-traded funds by your financial advisor.

Sleep deprivation hinders the body’s immune responses and thwarts the brain’s ability to organize memories, which is why we can’t remember where we put some of those memories. It ages the skin and can lead to poor judgment, like accepting spam calls about an expired car warranty from somebody in Billings, MT, or purchasing a high-fee, low-return annuity from that financial advisor, even during a bear market.

It can even cause weight gain. When you’re sleep deprived, your body increases the hormone that tells you you’re hungry while decreasing the hormone that controls your appetite. Also, since you’re sleeping less, you have more time to snack on Little Debbie’s.

Most of all, not getting enough sleep makes us tired. And it dominates our conversations.

When we get up in the morning, much too early in the morning, we talk about how we couldn’t sleep during the night.

My wife, for instance, notes that she awoke at 1:45 a.m., 3:19, and for good at 6:53. Competitive as always, I counter with taking 43 minutes to fall asleep, waking up at 2:57, and then waking for good—or rather for worse—at 5:19. I am the winner, or rather the loser.

We aren’t forced to get up early anymore because most of don’t have to commute to work or get the kids off to school. We’re getting up early because we’re tired of lying in bed counting sheep or counting medical conditions we need to mention to our doctors.

Not sleeping well, of course, is a classic sign of aging, right up there with needing to go to the bathroom right after you’ve gone to the bathroom. In our twenties and thirties, we could sleep until noon, at least partially because we didn’t go to bed until three in the morning.

Now, many of us haven’t been sleeping well for years. It could be because we have so much on our minds—global climate change, the rise of fascism, the immigration crisis, that worrisome new fluttering in our chest, and whether we turned off the oven. Mostly, we’re worried that when we go to bed we may not wake up. And then, of course, once we finally do get to sleep, we frequently have to get up in the middle of the night to go pee, trying to do it in the dark, and occasionally missing the target.

Technically speaking, as we age the master clock in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, known more informally as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, regulates our sleep cycles, or circadian rhythms. As the nucleus gets creaky and has difficulty concentrating on the paragraph it’s reading, our circadian rhythms get out of whack.

If we’re unable to find any whack, which happens when you get older because you can’t find where you’ve put anything, our bodies begin to produce lower levels of growth hormone, so we are likely to experience a decrease in slow wave or deep sleep, which is an especially refreshing part of the sleep cycle and was voted No. 1 sleep cycle in an AARP survey.

When this happens we produce less melatonin, meaning we’ll often experience more fragmented sleep and wake up more often during the night because we need to drive to the 24-hour Walgreens to pick up a case of melatonin.

These problems can be exacerbated by certain medicines we now take, which are designed to counter the side effects of other medicines we now take.

So, what’s the solution? I’ll tell you after my nap.

This story is adapted from my new book, Building a Better Boomer, available wherever books are sold.