The hidden work of sleep doesn't depend on time
We’ve spent decades obsessing over sleep duration. We’ve been told that getting those magic 8 hours is a must, and without them we’ll be in a sleep deficit. But the industry is finally widening its lens. Emerging research continues to prove that sleep is much more than a time-based measure. According to recent research, sleep regularity, keeping a consistent bed time and wake time is a far stronger predictor of long-term health and mortality than sleep duration.
So why is this? Let’s look at what the latest in sleep science says, and does it really get to the bottom of what makes healthy sleep?
During sleep, our brain and body need to coordinate all the vital processes that allow for our daily function. From supporting your immune system and metabolism, to regulating your core body temperature and orchestrating when and what hormones get released. Sleep regularity creates predictable sleep-wake patterns that help create the conditions for this recovery to happen. When sleep timing is inconsistent, these processes don’t operate properly. This is why even when you feel like you’ve slept enough, you can still wake up unrefreshed.
Shift-workers struggle with the regular shift in their schedules and how it impacts their sleep and health. A study from 2021 showed that shift-workers who maintained a longer sleep time did not see improvements in daytime sleepiness. However, those who kept a consistent wake time saw improvements in cognitive function, even if it meant less sleep on some nights.
Now, the evidence has reached a new level. Recently, a groundbreaking study following 60,000 adults found that people with consistent sleep schedules had ~48% lower risk of dying than those with irregular schedules. They also had 16% lower cancer and 22% lower cardiometabolic mortality risk. Perhaps most importantly, when researchers compared sleep regularity and sleep duration head-to-head as predictors of mortality, regularity was clearly a better measure.
The crucial insight
Sleep regularity itself doesn’t improve your health. What regularity provides is the predictable schedule that the Neural Function of Sleep requires to operate properly. When you don’t have a consistent schedule, Sleep’s Neural Function decreases. The downstream effect on your brain and body can be detrimental, showing up across your metabolism, cardiovascular health, immune function, and cognitive performance, regardless of total sleep time.
The benefits of sleep are driven by the Neural Function of Sleep. This describes the complex interaction of hormones and vital processes within the brain which are responsible for controlling and driving the physical, mental and biological health of the body.
The takeaway here isn’t that regularity itself is the goal. It’s that regularity sets the stage for our brain and body’s ability to restore us every night, creating the right environment for optimal Neural Function to occur. The Neural Function of Sleep determines long-term health outcomes. This is why the mortality study found sleep regularity mattered more than duration. You can sleep for 16 hours, but if your Neural Function is impaired, your brain and body’s ability to recover take an immediate hit.
Crucially, this understanding is no longer niche. The sleep and health industries are already shifting beyond a fixation on time, increasingly recognising the impact of disrupted sleep regularity on long-term health. Even the American Heart Association now acknowledges that when sleep timing is irregular, it can negatively affect our cardiovascular and metabolic health. Recognising regularity is more important than duration is an important first step. While this ultimately points back to reframing sleep health around driving the Neural Function of Sleep, this shift urges us to look beyond schedules and consider how different lifestyles and life stages can impact these vital processes. Simply optimising these schedules or chasing more time in bed will only get us so far.
And yet, attaining a perfectly consistent schedule is practically impossible for many people. For the heroes of our society, namely shiftworkers and parents of young children, make up the millions of those who often don’t have control over their schedules. These groups of people deserve optimal health and given the Neural Function of Sleep is the foundation of health, current sleep solutions which revolve around duration have already failed them. Strengthening Sleep’s Neural Function directly contributes to effective recovery and rejuvenation, even when perfect schedules are not realistic.
Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.
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