Dr. Matt Walker

Of that general all-cause mortality risk, when you split it apart, there was a 35% decrease in cancer mortality specifically, and there was almost a 60% decrease

de-risking of cardiovascular mortality risk if you are regular versus irregular.

Then they did this brilliant thing because they were measuring both the quantity of sleep and when these individuals were sleeping, they did what I just said, which is they put them into a statistical model.

Sure enough, the quantity of sleep, just as we've shown time and time again, was very predictive of all-cause mortality using that sweet spot of seven to nine hours.

And we can speak about what happens when you start to sleep longer because it's actually very unpredicted and it's very interesting.

But sweet spot of seven to nine, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.

That's what the data seems to suggest.

But what they found was that that was true, yet regularity or irregular sleep carried almost twice the effect size, the magnitude of predictability that duration did.

And I think the whole field, we knew that regularity, I knew that regularity was important.

I don't think we understood how important and the strength of mortality de-risking if you're regular or increased risk if you're irregular, that this metric of R carried in the QQRT equation.

So I've started to be much more mindful myself, at least, and almost over-index that.

The final aspect comes on to timing.

And I should say that we've used this essentially, this kind of equation, this sleep algorithm, as it were, of QQRT now in a lot of my work in the past at the Sleep Center in the past four or five years.

And it does seem to be a pretty good proxy of covering predictive-wise many aspects of your health.

That if you use any one of these by themselves,

Yeah, they help, they predict things.

But if you use them as a collective, that seems to be where you explain most of the variance.

Now, it's not by far a perfect measure.

There are even more nuanced ways that you would want to split it and I want to split it.

But I would say that this is a pretty good proxy for the general public.