🌅 The Sleep “Sweet Spot” That Slows Aging

SOURCE

The MULTI Consortium

WHAT TO KNOW

• Researchers at Columbia University analyzed the impact of sleep duration in middle and late life on 23 biological aging clocks across 17 organ systems, finding aging is slowest in the middle range of sleep and fastest on both the longer and shorter ends. Put differently, both too little and too much sleep appear to speed up biological aging. The study included health and sleep data collected from 500,000 U.K. adults, aged 37 to 84 years.

WHY IT MATTERS

• The researchers uncovered a U-shaped pattern between sleep duration and aging across nine major brain and body systems, finding that while the bottom of the curve varied by organ and sex, it consistently landed somewhere between 6.4 and 7.8 hours of sleep. The finding suggests the range is a “sweet spot” that helps slow aging across the entire body, representing a type of “Goldilocks” phenomenon for sleep duration.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• One interesting pattern uncovered by the researchers is that women appear to need about 10-20 more minutes of sleep than men to best slow aging in certain categories. For example, one brain clock showed men’s brains aged the least with 7.7 hours of sleep per night, while women did best with 7.82 hours. Researchers believe the difference could be driven by hormonal changes throughout life, particularly during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause.