A person’s quality of sleep should improve as he or she grows older, a new study published in the journal Sleep suggests.

Investigators originally set out to confirm the long-held belief that difficulty sleeping increases with age. But after conducting randomized telephone surveys of more than 155,000 adults, they found the reverse to be true.

“Even if sleep among older Americans is actually worse than in younger adults, feelings about it still improve with age,” Michael Grandner, Ph.D., said. “Once you factor out things like illness and depression, older people should be reporting better sleep.”