The competitors limited themselves to power naps, max 30 minutes though often just ten minutes.
The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps. Though IIRC the mental acuity did drop some as the event progressed.
Been at least 15 years since I saw the program so might misrember some parts, but I clearly recall the physical effects of the power naps.
Keep in mind these were quite fit athletes though.
I assume they weren't drinking coffee at every stop, do you remember what they did before napping ? (the "power" part)
The idea being that after 30 minutes other processes in the body kick in, so you feel much worse if you woke up after an hour.
That said, they usually did get some food, a bar or some hot stew IIRC. Though can't recall if they did that before or after the nap.
we don't even know if the "brain cleaning so, longterm, you don't get dementia" hypothesis is true, and here you/they are saying "we know it's false for these people".
nah, fam.
I assume you mixed these up?
There's two well-known extreme sleep schedules (Uberman 6x20m or Dymaxion 4x30m) that let you subsist on two hours of sleep a day, because you drop into REM sleep immediately. This however only clears up "brain fog". If you would do exercise on these sleep schedules, you would make little progress because muscle repair happens outside of REM sleep.
Sleeping you has the disadvantage it cannot keep score. Wake you has "I completed X today and Y yesterday". Advocate for sleeping you!
I need 5ish hours of sleep(usually less) and I feel that regular workouts (7 days a week, 60 min runs) help me clear brain fog a lot.
I used to be much more anxious about sleep — and life in general — but I have leaned that if I don’t sleep that is fine. Life goes on, the body gets what the body needs, and I should focus on living instead of sleeping.
Being active, spending time with friends, going outside for walks, laughing, and taking the world as it comes to me has done more for my sleep than reading studies or buying stuff (outside of a tempurpedic matress and solid oak frame).
Ad-hominem attacks against a person offering good-faith methodological criticism (such as calling them a "science denialist", or accusing them of being "misinformed" and/or "dishonest") is behavior that seeks to defend the results of a study more strongly than it seeks to discover the truth.
If you have a critique of my methodological criticism itself, by all means, please share it, but the entire scientific community would be better off if we could do away with this kind of emotionally-charged quasi-religious dogma that seeks to suppress legitimate scientific concerns through social ostracism.
--------------- Compare and contrast the above with what follows: ---------------
Your post reminds me of the reaction of the Catholic Church to Copernicus's assertions of a heliocentric solar system.
--------------- Notice how sticking to objective, unemotional, and impersonal language in the first section is more conducive to earnest scientific inquiry than the personal attack in the second section?
That being said, there is a lot of diversity amongst us, and I'm quite sure that when you factor in (epi-)genetic variation - particularly in the short to medium term - there are some unexpected advantage/cost ratios to wildly different strategies.
I'd love to try a fixed sleep schedule, but sometimes I don't get home until 2am, other times I have to get up at 7:30am.
Of course, spending 12-14 hours a day facing brights screens do not help.
I am fully awake and ready to go a few minutes after waking up, too. No coffee needed.
I do occasionally take an hour nap here and there, but that is also rare.
I used to think it was related to caffeine or work stress but cutting out drinking seems to have fixed all my sleep issues.
6 hours is too little IMO. If I sleep 6 hours for more than a few days in a row, I feel like shit and need caffeine to wake up properly. Then I end up sleeping 10-12 hours on my days off to compensate (and to take a break from caffeine). It doesn't feel healthy.
So, I try to get at least 8 hours consistently. That way, I don't need caffeine at all and function just about fine.
Baymax: Oh no.
The yo yo of late weekends and spending part of the week trying to get back to an earlier time left me tired much of the time.
They look at one week of sleep data and then check mortality records about 10 to 15 years later. It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out.
Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality, but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion. I'd really like to see the same study with longer term sleep data.
Statistically—absolutely, I agree with you, but controls and sample sizes can always be improved.
Narratively—it's also not difficult to see: "gunk builds up in brain; gunk requires regular removal; sleep removes gunk; stable sleep removes gunk better than unstable sleep"
It's difficult to blame people for emotionally attaching more to the latter than the former.
It might just be another "Poorer people don't live as long" correlation.
I estimate that some 2-4% of the group could be heavily involved in caring for grandchildren, sorting themselves into the irregular category. It's well-known that school-aged children pass flu to grandparents [2], and then grandparents die, just in time for the 7-year post-birth observation window. The absolute death rate due to flu is 10^-4 to 10^-3 per year, which would be visible on the paper's mortality time course chart.
Estimation details:
* some 20% are grandparents (and very few are parents) of young children [0] * 20-50% of grandparents care for grandchildren regularly [1]
So maybe 4-10% of the cohort as an upper bound. If the birth rate is 12 per 1000 per year, and babies cause sleep disruption for about two years to two persons, then that's about 4% also, but perhaps mostly not the same age group.
[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5eeb975b86650...
[1]: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/articles/2017/september...
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00255...
Going to sleep now.
While true health insurance isn't attached to jobs in the same way, there's still uneven access - the town I grew up in closed it's local surgery a decade or so ago, so it's about a 30 minute drive, or over 2 hours on a rather indirect bus. Not everyone has a car, or can afford to take pretty much an entire day off work to get there. Assuming you can actually get an appointment, too. Richer areas often are better served, and richer people have better access to transport and time flexibility.
And my job came with BUPA membership, which can also make some things easier, it's not the hard barrier to any care in the same way as the American system.
And while the paper said that it corrected for Socioeconomic status, knowing the /scale/ (and possible error) in that correction relative to the claimed meaningful difference would be useful in studies like this. It feels like the sort of correction should be detailed more than just saying they did it.
But I guess the paper isn't really claiming causation, merely correlation in that it's a predictor of mortality. Though many commenters here seem to assume.
Okay
Once you get past painfully obvious problems, everything not currently easily fixed by modern medicine tends to be "well it's really complicated" sets of problems; there's not one Cancer, your blood pressure can be elevated for many reasons, syndromes like chronic fatigue are almost certainly a mix of dozens of problems binned together by common symptoms but will have different causes and treatments.
Anyone saying they have one treatment to fix dozens of problems is a huckster, and trying to come up with a medical Theory of Everything to explain large swaths of disease is your origin story for how you become a huckster.
If you think of life as the careful coordination of millions of parts, then there will be a million of things that if you fuck up you will die.
Like it breaks down at an exponentially increasing rate. Hard to keep up with that.
Alzheimer's is the fifth-leading cause of death among Americans age 65 and older.
Is 500k brits for 1 week as good as 5k brits for 100 weeks.
Effectively with so much data aren't you getting a superposition anyway.
In statistical mechanics there's a concept of "ensemble average" and its provable that if you have a system, the average state of the system over say a 100 realisations ("ensemble average") run for 1 second each, is equal to the the average of one system run for a 100 seconds - under some assumptions of course.
I don't know enough a about human biology to make a statement about whether any of those assumptions will hold true, but maybe someone else will.
In the similar way sampling the height of 1000 of 1M people will give you a good estimate of the average.
The weeks that were measured in this study were not random. How far from random is the big question.
As you point out that's a multi day commitment, and if part of the volunteers either adjust the timing of the experiments to match specific weeks (e.g. parents choosing school vacations), or adjust their schedule accordingly, what is measured becomes fundamentally different in nature to what measuring longer periods would bring.
I'm with you on how we don't have a choice regarding to the quality of the study, it's just crazy hard to get any data at scale. But we can look at it as a very flawed "best of what we can do" and not take the patterns too seriously.
You got it.
"but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion"
This is always the case unless you assume reality is as big as what you can perceive.
"I'd really like to see the same study with longer term sleep data."
You can say this of literally 100% of the studies, it will never be enough. I understand it when authors put this at the end of a study because they want more funding and because their subject is all they think about. But for reasonable human beings you gotta make a common sense jump and allocate resources to other subjects. Yes, regular sleep has good effects on health, the burden of proof of that was already 0, this study is a nice added touch, there will be no double dessert, move on.
My bet is no drugs, and have faith in your agency.
There is a specific question that needs to be addressed: With a one week window into sleep habits, are we selecting for people who are chronically poor sleepers, with those poor sleep habits leading to disease?
OR
Are we selecting for people who are chronically ill for other reasons and those chronic illnesses prevent them from getting regular sleep?
For example, people with sleep apnea have terrible sleep, and they have lower life expectancy than the general population. However, the cause of that lower life expectancy is not the poor quality of sleep; it's the cardiac effects of abnormal breathing over a long period of time.
If a person with decades of excellent sleep habits developed sleep apnea in the last 5 to 10 years of their life, the accelerometer will capture their irregular sleep and the death registry will capture their early deaths. That doesn't mean poor sleep habits killed them.
There are many other such chronic illnesses that can be confounded this way. Heart failure. Obstructive lung disease. Dementia. All can lead to irregular sleep. Add them together and you've captured a large segment of the population with ~10 years left to live.
The authors address this relationship in the conclusion and supplementary materials, but they appear to approach it entirely from the framework of poor sleep being causative of cardiovascular disease. Well yes, there's evidence that poor sleep can cause cardiovascular disease, but it's also well established (as I explained) that it can happen the other way around. If you want to cement a full chain of causality, you need a longer time window. Capture a young population with a low burden of chronic disease, show that poor sleep habits came first (i.e. within a certain age window), then cardiovascular disease, and then shorter lifespan. That would be the ideal data, even if difficult to acquire.
> There are several limitations in this study. First, the single week of data collected for each individual provides only a snapshot of their sleep–wake patterns, and future work should collect sleep–wake data over a longer timeframe and include multiple weekend-weekday transitions. It is nevertheless interesting that even a snapshot of sleep behaviors is predictive of mortality for a follow-up period of several years.
When remote work is an option, it'd be nice to know the health opportunity cost of RTO. Sadly the cohort is too hard to study outside of nursing home residents.
But as a freelancer, my sleep schedule is more or less my own. I go to sleep when I'm tired and usually try to sleep as long as I want to. Sometimes that's 11pm-10am, sometimes 6am-11am. It can oscillate throughout the week, but I try to average 16 hours of sleep in any given 48 hour period.
Maybe this is incredibly unhealthy, but I've believed for a long time that it's kept me younger and healthier than being forced into a sleep rhythm that isn't what my body wants.
Sincerely, someone forced into a "normal" schedule by kids school start times and, well, everything else too, I suppose.
Kids would definitely screw up this aspect of my lifestyle lol. But kids give you immortality, and here I am just wondering if I'm gaining or losing a couple years.
I got fired from several jobs because of it. My folks weren't understanding so I genuinely believed that I was willingly staying up and well... Needless to say I have no professional network and most of my friends thought I was a massive flake and those connections fell apart, too. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. Even diagnosed with insomnia I still feel massive guilt about not being able to sleep like a normal person. I just ruin everyone's plans around me. If I need to be up I have to hope my medication works (when employed) and if it does I need an hour to wake up enough to feel safe doing anything major like cooking or driving.
Sorry for the ramble. Appropriately I've been up for like 34 hours and am hoping these OTC meds kick in.
Hope y'all have a great weekend.
Just a piece of unsolicited advice: I learned to make a virtue out of it. I'm a solo software dev and I have to maintain big pieces of code that run 24/7. Well, my virtue is that I've been available 24/7 to my clients for the last 20 years. And one of the results of that has been that they've never abandoned me and gone to larger companies to deal with software issues. My own schedule is so variable, it doesn't really matter if I'm asleep or awake or what time zone they're in; if it's not urgent, it goes into my inbox, but if it's urgent, I usually answer the phone immediately. Part of this has been adding layers of support forms so I don't have to wake up to every phone call. But the people who have my cell number get through right away.
The result of that is that I basically get paid $300 every time I have to wake up, which is soul-soothing enough to prevent me from being angry. And the rest of the time I can sleep whenever I feel like it.
Being on a 32:12 hour cycle could have massive rewards. Clients are extremely appreciative, especially if you break your sleep for something important. Like, don't be afraid to tell your clients about your sleep cycle. Getting through admitting that was probably the biggest breakthrough of my career. My girlfriend loves that I'm still up working and make her breakfast at 4am when she's headed for work some days, or make her dinner when she comes home at night others. It's always a surprise, I tell her. You just have to find people who appreciate the energy you bring.
Yes, the "straight world" of people with 9-5 jobs and kids absolutely abhors this lifestyle and thinks it's irresponsible and flakey. But then again, they don't get paid $300 for waking up in the middle of the day ;) My friends (and girlfriends) are lyft drivers, waiters, coders, night shift workers, and other people who spurn daylight society. We are legion.
Maybe that is what this study is capturing.
I can't imagine subjecting anyone to disturbances while sleeping.
Unfortunately, while I'm medicated I can't help sleeping through alarms so my last partner refused to cohabitate at night. I understood but it didn't help things.
I use the term inverted to describe my circadian rhythm but people who don't see me physically suffer from being awake for days don't get it. My folks think I'm making it up and my friends get it but also don't.
I have no idea what CBN is. Not intentionally tried the magnesium but I can keep an eye out. I'm between jobs so I can't really afford to get up and buy things too often but I'll add it to my list to look for.
CBN is a federally legal cannabinoid that is reportedly pretty good for sleep, not causing intoxication or interfering with REM like THC does.
I have not tried it, although I do regularly use THC (also not good for the brain) for sleep that, along with a meal, reliably gets me asleep very quickly, although unfortunately without noticeable dreams and with a distinct laziness in the morning, but with these negatives somewhat mitigated when magnesium l-threonate is added.
https://harborcityhemp.com/product/ultra-potency-cbn-tinctur...
Wikipedia [0] criticises these experiments and says they didn't account for electric light, which apparently lengthens the cycle. So to rephrase, people with any access whatsoever to electric light favour a 25-26 hour day. You're still totally normal, but it explains you may have better outcomes with annoying interventions like "no artificial light in the last few hours of the evening".
Soon, all night time electric lighting seemed batshit crazy. Dozens of times too bright. Of course we all can’t fucking sleep. It’s so wildly much brighter than necessary.
I gave it up after a few weeks because it’s pretty much impossible to keep up if you’re ever around other people in the evening (and I have a family, so…) and they’re not entirely on-board, or just need to get stuff done at night because life is busy (again: I have a family) and everything about modern scheduling and activities assumes you can do things for hours after sun-down.
But, the experience did convince me that 95% of “night owls” and serious trouble sleeping are just the obvious and natural consequence of crazy-bright nighttime lighting and hyper-stimulating electronic home entertainment (which all also emits light, so I was shunning that stuff after dark too during my experiment). We have a sleeplessness epidemic? Gee I wonder if it’s because we light up our houses like a carnival and then put a world’s fair x100 at our finger tips. Like, yes, of course it’s that.
I’ve since discovered that low-dose weed gummies also get the job done with no side effects (aside from allowing me an hour or so of giggly TV watching right before bed, if I want it—oh no, what a tragedy), for me, and are far more compatible with modern life. Kinda lame to have to medicate my way out of the human body and mind of course not being able to cope with what we all do to them after dark, through.
I’ve used the analogy on here before, but imagine some 18th century emperor or king complained to his physician that he’d been lighting up his palace and grounds every night as bright possible and hosting a weeks-long 24/7 festival featuring the world’s finest entertainers (including the rather lewd sorts), intellectuals, travelers and philosophers, jesters and players, and, well, for some reason he’s having trouble falling asleep at a decent hour. LOL fucking yeah, dude, no wonder.
But we do that and then go “man I wonder if maybe I need a better pillow or to get more vitamin D” or whatever. Seriously?
I keep my lights very low in the hours before I go to bed, and use candles, and mostly read books rather than electronic devices. But one thing I'd point out is that - I live fairly far north. At this time of the year, there is very little direct sunlight at all. Whole days can be as dark as 6am, and the sun will be setting before 5pm soon. There is a balance, in the winter, when without bright electric light you could never really wake up. And sometimes it feels like living on a space station, because if you're a night owl that's the only light you get. I've had modestly good results from using a "happy lamp" during the darkest days. Just pointing out that - although I agree with you about clamping down on carnival lights at night - there is an opposite extreme which can cause people to go into a sort of seasonal hibernation.
To be fair, we're all like this. The average length of Circadian Cycle is closer to 25h than 24h when isolated: https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info/cycle_length.ph...
Anyway if your schedule doesn’t impact you in a negative way then go for it
Unfortunately I really enjoy night time, so I regularly completely fail at that task. I can’t remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, and yet here I am on Hacker News at 1:48am. At least I can sleep in tomorrow.
In my adult life I have ranged between 5-6 cups a day when I used to go into the office and none at all during periods where I just fell out of the habit of making any.
lol. Same here. Keeping your digestive system on track with your sleep cycle deserves a whole separate discussion. For those of us who've discovered coffee and cigarettes, usually the sight of one or the other is enough to get ya goin'
People speak of teenagers having a different sleep cycle but I'm now suspecting that, rather than that you'd grow out of your body's schedule, it's just that you don't complain to your toddler and expect them to understand and shift your job of entertaining them to later in the day. Same story at work; also a factor most teenagers don't have in the same way. So you suck it up and fall into a new rhythm that kinda works too
1) No nighttime lighting brighter than a single-digit count of candles. No glowing screens after dark, either. Within a couple days I was no longer a “night owl”. Go figure, it was all fake, all those years.
2) A few mg of THC edible 90 minutes before I want to be asleep.
I’d tried prescription sleep aids in the past and did have issues with grogginess. Between that, needing timing to be pretty precise for the grogginess not to be even worse, and having to choose between “glass of wine” and “be able to sleep”, those had enough down-sides that it didn’t really work out (the “still feel shitty in the morning” bit was definitely the worst part)
As for your two points, they’re not super practical for me, at least not for a big chunk of the year. From now until about February it goes dark around 5pm, so that would effectively mean no lights, video games, movies/TV, or browsing on work days. And while weed will succeed in knocking me the hell out, it’s illegal for recreational use here, and very difficult to get a medical prescription, so it’s not something I have regular access to.
I'm the king of getting a second wind, but it's usually alcohol-driven. Curtailing food and booze about 3 hrs before sleep, watching a little Mentour Pilot or reading a book, I'll conk out before I planned to. Avoiding the second wind is a discussion in itself.
+1 for Mentour Pilot, love his videos
I used to have a schedule where I would start nodding off at 8PM and had to sleep, then wake up within 10 minutes of 4AM the next morning. My whole day was on such a routine, I never had to check the time. I could tell by temperature, sun, what I was doing, how I felt (hungry, tired) what time it was. I would be at my highest energy for the first hours after waking up. Then my energy would plunge during midday. Then it would build back up leading into the evening until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. Maybe 4 to 8PM I would be at good energy until I hit the abrupt cliff. I guess I was sort of a morning AND night person. I had to train my body to get on this schedule.
However, I eventually overcame those challenges and created my own schedule to work with, and my sleep cycle became better then onwards.
Before artifical light, alarm clocks, jobs, screens with blue light etc - we presumably woke and slept fairly consistently, no doubt tied partly to sunlight and temperature. Some people probably slept more than others, as they always have, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot more consistency.
Disclaimer: I know nothing, just interested
Evolution can't select for anything that happens significantly past the birth of your progeny.
A second child would help with that too.
Additionally, even if you were looking to predict selection many generations in the future; modern reproduction happens at higher rates the lower in economic disparity you go, so clearly that isn’t the case.
The point is that there many valuable things that parents can pass on after the birth of their children that will increase their chances of success in future generations.
How to Train Yourself to Go to Sleep Earlier
Not totally disagreeing with you, but this indicates that it is _more_ important than the latter two when concerned with all-cause mortality.
Err yeah they do? That's 'a night out', 'going out for drinks', 'night on the town', etc.
Sort of get the point, but not a brilliant analogy ;)
But you're right, people do say it so he's wrong. You could rephrase it as going on a bender and not eating/drinking as healthy is probably just as bad as lack of regular sleep.
I've walked myself into a circle. You're right
nowadays I still do some kind of on-call hours, and I think being on call should pay a butt load more honestly.
I was wondering if you actually did some job on a graveyard at night or if there was a second meaning there. Good I looked that up...
Another strategy is to fill your day with deep work and exercise, so as to ensure maximum tiredness at night.
Nowadays, my sleeping patterns are mostly regular thanks to these protocols. Every day about 9pm, I feel sleepy, and my bed begins to look very enticing. I follow this pattern for my daily well-being, but it’s nice to know it reduces my mortality risk, too.
If haven’t found out, I wholly recommend doing a sleep study if you can. It can shed some light on any obstacles you may be experiencing. I’ve never done one myself, but I know people who got enduring benefits from the insights of their studies.
I asked him why he would prescribe a stimulant so late in the day. His reply was simply "it's so you can think of one thing instead of all the things".
Worked for me.
I remember the exact day my body switched - I was going in the early morning and my body was not approving of my initiative. Every morning was hell - but then one morning early spring we had a training outside - sunrise, early leaves on the trees in the park, we all got quite sweaty some of the guys started to take our tops off and it looked like a scene from a martial arts movie. I remember thinking this looks so cool - we’re training like our forefather used to.
Next day I woke up exact time I needed no grogginess whatsoever. Have been an early bird ever since, almost 10 years now.
The window is 90m, to account for 90m sleep cycle. I set the alarm to whichever multiple of 90 falls within the wake up window.
As a result, I sleep somewhere with 7h to 7h30 consistently, with the odd ~6h sleep day or ~9h in special circumstances (being sick).
It has a bunch of other features as well (rating how well you slept and detecting patterns to give advice, a snore detector, etc) but that alarm is the one I use it for.
I stop reading this 8 hr nonsense or fearing an early death from not sleeping. whatever.
but to go to sleep!
But I have tried something similar: setting an alarm to decompress before sleeping. No phone, no TV — just some quiet music playing or some books to read.
I still set this night alarm, but it is much easier to ignore it than to ignore my body’s natural tendency to lose steam after waking up early and having done so much during the day.
What helped was notifications leading up to bedtime. two hours, one hour 30 minute, "get to sleep". It sort of gives you context to wind down.
I’d be wary of relying on alcohol to sleep, because the relaxation that it offers is somewhat distinct from a good night’s sleep.
Alcohol has been known to disrupt “REM sleep”, thus making your sleep phases inconsistent. In the long run, it might leave you with even poorer sleep quality.
It's your behavior and attitude towards going to bed.
It might change depending on the seasons, and you might more or less sleep depending on what you're doing at that time.
Waking up at the same damn hour everyday to deal with my kid's school was an utter pain for years, and I got in a better health and shape once I could adjust depending on my daily condition.
It still have a set of fixed alarms, but regularly ignore the first ones as needed, and only wake no-matter-what for the last one for my job. I heard from other coworkers doing the same, and it was a game-changer for most of us.
Another piece of anecdata from someone who used to be like this for years. I first noticed that regular alarm sounds annoyed me and eventually I would get used to turning it off and going back to sleep (that is until I HAVE to wake up). I then figured that if I set up an alarm with a song that I like, it would make waking up more enjoyable. Which I eventually did. The first few weeks, I enjoy waking up and in a sense look forward to it, but after a certain amount of time not only I get used to it and the cycle continue, but I also can't stand that song anymore (RIP rolling in the deep, chainsmoking, ...). I randomly stumbled upon the app sleep for Android that has a feature I didn't know I needed, putting a playlist as an alarm sound (I shuffle it of course). Now every morning, waking up is an adventure, and more often than not I end up singing along. Now months in, I haven't failed to wake up even once. And I don't have any alarms on Sunday, yet I still wake up without it.
That is with the caveat that I know I need between 7:30 and 8h of sleep, and I stop all screens by 10 (night time feature of Android is very helpful in this regard). Except my ebook reader than I use without backlight.
A lot of people are weirdly proud of how early they wake up, and I’ve literally been shamed for waking up late, called lazy etc in a casual sense but that’s nonsense. I just work later.
The first is that phones and light break our natural sleepiness triggers and the second is that we don't exercise our bodies enough because of our sedentary lifetstyle.
I used to struggle with terrible insomnia and I still get bouts of it time to time but I've also found it's related to my laxing my 3 rules.
If I have a good workout about 5x a week, I turn off my phone and the lights 30 minutes before bed and take a good long shower in the dark and I have a regular alarm set at 7am that goes off 7 days a week, I'm almost guaranteed a good nights sleep every night. It also had the added affect of ridding me of my night terrors and sleep walking I used to have frequently but I'm 90% certain that was correlated to me using my phone in bed and it causing my brain to enter a weird state where it never really turned off.
The older I get the more reluctant I am to make the trade. Few glasses of wine with friends is hard to pass up though :)
I don't know to translate that into a statement like: If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, you would live __(x days)__ longer on average. With some hand-wavy reasoning I arrived at something like 10 days longer over a period of 10 years. I.e., a very small amount on average. I'd welcome someone with a statistics background to do a real calculation.
looks like i'm in danger
If you set up your bedroom “too well” - quiet, light blocking roller blinds etc, then your body can only rely on the internal clock.
I used to have that but since moving to another place without those “niceties” suddenly my body quite easily finds “the correct time” every day.
Also you can experiment with this on long flights to get rid of jet lag. After I land, if I spend the first night drinking and fall asleep, I effectively ruin my internal clock for the night, and then the body has only the environmental queues. Wake up in the morning and my clock is effectively reset. Might not feel great for the day but suffer zero jet lag as I start waking up in the morning at the “correct” time even though I’ve flown halfway across the planet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep–wake_disorde...