An OHSU study just dropped that looked at county-level life expectancy across every US state from 2019 to 2025. They compared sleep, diet, exercise, social connection, and a bunch of other lifestyle factors.

Sleep won. Not by a little. Insufficient sleep — anything under seven hours — was a stronger predictor of shorter life than diet. Than exercise. Than social isolation. The only thing that beat it was smoking.

The lead researcher said he didn't expect it. And he's a sleep physiologist. That's how strong the signal was.

Now think about how most of us treat sleep. It's the first thing you sacrifice when life gets busy. You'll track your macros, you'll force yourself to the gym at 6am on four hours of rest, you'll optimize your supplement stack — but sleep? Sleep is what you "catch up on" during weekends. Which, by the way, doesn't work the way you think it does.

There's a separate Lancet study from January that looked at what happens when you combine small improvements in sleep, exercise, and diet together. The minimum effective dose for sleep was five extra minutes per night. Five. That, combined with two extra minutes of movement and half a serving of vegetables, was associated with a meaningful change in both lifespan and healthspan.

Five minutes. You're probably losing that scrolling before bed.

I've been tracking my own sleep for years, and the thing that always surprises me is how much my cognitive performance the next day correlates with the previous night. Not my workout. Not my food. The sleep.

Your body doesn't lie about this one. We just don't want to hear it. 🌕

#body