Regular Sleep Patterns Cut Mortality Risk by 24%
Sleep Is the Second Strongest Predictor of Life Expectancy After Smoking
New research is drawing attention to the idea that how regularly you sleep, rather than simply how long you sleep, is a key factor that can determine life expectancy.
Science Daily and other science outlets recently reported that global healthcare company Vitality and a research team from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the United Kingdom analyzed about 47 million pieces of sleep data, including records from wearable devices and insurance data from around 100,000 people.
The benchmark proposed by the researchers is the so-called "7:1 sleep rule." It refers to the habit of sleeping at least 7 hours a day on at least 5 days a week, while keeping your bedtime within a 1-hour variation each day. The group that met this standard had a 24% lower risk of death and up to a 7% lower likelihood of hospital admission than the group with irregular sleep patterns.
The research team concluded that maintaining this kind of sleep habit could potentially increase life expectancy by 2 to 4 years. They explained that irregular sleep can disrupt the body clock, which may affect immune function and the risk of chronic diseases.
The total amount of sleep itself also still proved to be important. In a paper published in the journal SLEEP Advances, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in the United States analyzed county-level life expectancy between 2019 and 2025 along with survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They found that the less people in a region slept than 7 hours a night on average, the shorter the local life expectancy tended to be. Sleep deprivation showed a stronger correlation with life expectancy than diet, physical activity, or social isolation. The only factor that had a greater impact than sleep was smoking.
Another study found that among people who slept less than 6 hours a night, the brain’s waste clearance mechanism (the glymphatic system) did not operate sufficiently, leading to a buildup of Alzheimer’s-related proteins at more than twice the rate observed in the 7-to-8-hour sleep group.
Experts advise that reducing so-called "social jet lag" by not trying to catch up on sleep only on weekends, and instead maintaining 7 to 9 hours of sleep at a consistent time every day, can help promote long-term health and extend lifespan.
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