Jay Novella

The point here is that the relationship is not linear.

So more sleep was not always better and less sleep was not harmless.

And the healthiest looking range, at least by the biological aging measures that they did in this study, they were always in the middle.

The researchers know that self-reported sleep is imperfect, right?

Anybody that's self-reporting basically on anything is going to have their own perspective and skew, and they're not going to make good estimations exactly on how long they slept.

It's all just too subjective.

But what they felt was that the data set was so large, and it was a very large data set,

that there was enough data there to look for patterns across all these biological systems, meaning that even with the errors in self-reporting, there were consistencies that showed connections to good or bad health.

And they tested 23 different aging clocks, and nine of them showed the same basic pattern.

People at either end of the sleep range looked biologically older than people in the middle.

And these involve systems connected to the brain, you know, the lungs, the liver, immune system, skin, endocrine system, adipose tissue, and pancreas.

And so, you know, these are all very important things, right, as a human.

You want these functioning well.

I like my pancreas.

Me too.

Yeah, and how often do you really think about it?

Like, how's my pancreas doing?

Yeah, mine's kind of annoying.

The study doesn't prove that sleeping too little or too much directly causes accelerated aging.

It just shows an association between too much sleep or too little sleep with being biologically older, right?