Dr. Matt Walker

Please look at me when you say presence.

People feel about us.

I got into bed at the same time, but last night I went to sleep about an hour later.

And then the night before, you know, I got into bed and I just turned the lights out.

And then, you know,

Two nights ago, I got into bed again at the same time, but then I was kind of online shopping and I started chatting with a friend in a different time zone.

And then it was two and a half hours later before lights out.

That is what we would classify as irregular sleep.

And the reason that this has really been forced on me is important.

There was a great study that came out, maybe, I'll get this wrong, from about five months from the time of filming this ago.

And it used a huge database, something called the UK Biobank, which is a wonderful database.

And they looked at over 60,000 individuals.

And they looked, they were able to track the sleep from one night to the next, to the next, to the next.

So they had some metric of this consistency, this regularity.

And then they split those 60,000 individuals into quartiles.

And in their statistical model, they looked at people who were most regular versus people who were least regular.

And they tracked them over years.

What they found, and then they looked at their mortality risk, how likely was it that those people would pass away during that study interval, and they were also able to map what were they dying of if they passed away.

So what they found was that those people who are in the top quartile of being most regular relative to those people who are highly irregular, if you had good regular sleep,

you had a 49% reduced risk of mortality relative to someone who was very irregular.