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Impaired Slow-Wave Sleep Accounts for Brain Aging-Related Increases in Anxiety

Communications Psychology

Eti Ben Simon, Vyoma D. Shah, Olivia Murillo, Zavecz Zsofia and Matthew P. Walker

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OVERVIEW

Aging takes a toll on more than just memory — it quietly erodes emotional stability. The most common mental health condition in adults over 60, anxiety doesn't just cause distress on its own: each new anxiety symptom nearly doubles the risk of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. Two brain changes reliably accompany aging — shrinkage in emotion-regulating brain regions and a steep decline in deep, slow-wave sleep — but until now, no one has examined whether those two factors are connected to ask whether the loss of deep sleep's characteristic "slow waves" is the missing link between an aging brain and worsening emotional health.Researchers recruited 61 cognitively healthy adults over age 65, each with varying levels of anxiety, and brought them into the sleep lab for a carefully monitored overnight stay. Electrodes recorded brain activity throughout the night, capturing the slow electrical oscillations that define deep, restorative sleep. The following morning, participants completed anxiety questionnaires and underwent MRI brain scans so researchers could measure tissue loss in regions known to govern fear and emotion — including the amygdala, insula and cingulate cortex. To check whether findings held up over time, a subset of 24 participants returned an average of four years later to repeat the entire process.The results tell a coherent and clinically important story. Participants who generated fewer slow waves during the night woke up more anxious the next morning — and this effect held steady even after accounting for age, sex and baseline anxiety tendencies. Brain scans confirmed older adults with more tissue loss in emotion-sensitive regions also produced fewer slow waves. Findings open a genuinely actionable door for future research: non-invasive techniques that boost slow-wave activity during sleep — such as acoustic or gentle electrical brain stimulation — may offer a way to preserve emotional resilience in aging brains, even in the presence of structural decline that cannot be reversed.

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Photograph of neuroscientist Eti Ben Simon, PhD at Center for BrainHealth in Dallas, Texas, with a luminous glass sculpture of human neurons in the background.

Eti Ben Simon, PhD

Research Assistant Professor Associate Director, Sleep Innovation Laboratories

Matthew Walker, PhD, inside Center for BrainHealth's Brain Performance Institute.

Matthew Walker, PhD

Director, Sleep Innovation Laboratories Laurie and Todd Platt Chair in BrainHealth Professor of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering

Related Information

A standing in front of a digital display wall used for brain research, wearing research gear inside the Sleep Innovation Lab at UT Dallas' Center for BrainHealth (branded with organizational logo).

Sleep Innovation Laboratories

Pioneering a New Approach to Sleep Science
The Sleep Innovation Laboratories is a visionary research initiative uniting science, technology and human performance to unlock the transformative power of sleep on brain health, spearheaded by acclaimed neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker, PhD, as inaugural director, alongside associate director Eti Ben Simon, PhD.