Jay Novella

Your mental health is affected by your sleep as well for a lot of people.

So I chose this item to talk about because it digs into a study that did what I think is a very good job at studying sleep patterns and how much time do people need.

And it gets into some real biological outcomes if you don't get enough sleep or if you get too much sleep.

So this study was published in Nature and they were looking at, like I said, sleep duration and biological aging and if there's a connection between the two.

So it wasn't just a sleep good for you study.

They really were asking whether different amounts of sleep...

are linked to any measurable signs that parts of your body are aging faster or slower.

What impact does sleep overall have on your physiology?

So they compared, it was a self-reported sleep duration with 23 biological aging clocks that they came up with, which I'll explain.

The basic idea is that these clocks estimate whether

a tissue or organ system appears biologically older or younger than a person's actual age, right?

Steve, you and I were just talking about this, right?

You know, Steve was telling me and Bob about how, you know, he's tracked patients over the course of his entire career where he could look at them and be like, okay, that person looks to be about 50 and then he'll open up their chart and they're actually 30.

And then of course he finds out, well, they've been smoking since they were teenagers or drinking alcohol or whatever.

Well, sleep is kind of like that, right?

Sleep has that kind of effect.

So the clocks were built basically from MRI imaging, blood proteins, metabolites, these small molecules that are involved in metabolism.

So that's what they're tracking.

So as a cool example here, like two people might both be 60 years old.

But one person's brain and liver and their immune system or their metabolic profile might look older than the others.