Pillar 2 Sleep

This is post 2 of 6 focused on exploring my 'six pillars of health'. 

Coming at longevity medicine without a mental model leads me to fall down a dizzying rabbit hole of options which are overwhelming and exhausting. Thus, I created a six pillar model of health that allows me to sort, triage, and critically assess all the information I obtain in my never ending journey to optimize health. 

My six pillars are Life Philosophy, Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, Social, and Sex. Is there something sacred about these 6 pillars? No, these pillars were not divine revelation delivered to me on tablets of stone. However, I have found that designing specific and actionable interventions to improve health works well in the 6 pillar paradigm. It’s broad enough to cover the most important bases but not so broad as to be directionless and unhelpful; they are useful guide-rails that are not overly ridged. 

With that being said, let's take a look at our second pillar, 'Sleep'.

Ahhh, yes. Perhaps the most neglected of our pillars. Our society gives sleep a Rodney Dangerfield level of “No Respect.” Sleep is often the first thing to go when the shitshow of life throws a curveball at us. We sacrifice it without the awareness of we are even giving up. Why is sleep so important? How does it affect the other 5 pillars of our health? I’ll give you a hint, it’s much more powerful and pervasive than you realize. In my practice I sit down and explore how much you need, why you need it, how to track it, and then how to improve it. 

The take home is that bad sleep negatively affects every system in the body. It increases mental health issues, worsens metabolic health, increases fat retention, decreases lean muscle mass, makes you look objectively less attractive, increases heart disease and cancer, is causally liked to dementia, leads to impotence and decreased fertility, decreases endurance, strength and reaction time, increases injury rates, decreases creativity and intelligence, destroys memory and social interactions, and objectively makes it that you are more likely to die at any moment. I could go on, but if that list didn't convince you, then we're not a good patient doctor fit. 

Good quality sleep on the other hand improves all of the systems in the body. Getting this good quality sleep depends on focused consistency. Simple interventions such as timing of eating, a pre-bedtime routine, temperature and lighting, being intentional about stimulant use, and consistent sleep and wake times can have huge implications on how you manifest good quality sleep. 

If you are not conscientiously prioritizing sleep, you are leaving this critical health pillar to the whims of a society that clearly doesn't value it, and as a result you will be the unfortunate recipient of the catastrophic sequelae.