The longevity movement is seeking rejuvenation interventions to reverse the damage of aging. Perhaps part of this solution has been under our noses the whole time?
Good sleep allows the body to heal incredibly well, and yet considerations of improving sleep seem to end at consuming a bit less caffeine, going to bed early, avoiding blue lights, a cool temperature and a weighted blanket.
We need to figure out the mechanisms that make sleep rejuvenating and beneficially upregulate them. We need to engineer “Sleep 2.0", augmented with the right drugs, supplements, technologies and practices that enhance the beneficial rejuvenating effects of sleep.
We already go to sleep every night, so if we can make this more optimal there is no excuse not to.
If anyone has seen the series Dragon Ball Z they might have seen this “medical machine” which heals injured fighters while they sleep:
I could imagine some advanced sleep amplification device like this.
I’m curious what ideas people have here. I’ve got a list of things below in no particular order that I thought might be of some value.
Possible things to stack:
HGH
Blood pressure management including medications
High dose instant release melatonin combined with extended-release melatonin
Redosing instant release melatonin if you wake up to go to bathroom.
Improve natural production of melatonin
Is a tryptophan metabolite, ensure adequate tryptophan intake and experiment with supplementation at night.
Tryptophan metabolism is depedent on how much IDO and TDO enzymes convert tryptophan to kynurenine
Therefore inhibiting IDO and TDO to some degree can increase the amount of tryptophan remains as tryptophan to be turned into tryptophan metabolites instead of kunurenine metabolites
There are likely other factors involved such as blue light and others, but the underlying substrate is tryptophan and this needs to be focused on.
I just achieved an average of 97% score in my sleep by whoop and I had this exact thought. Should i stop optimizing and focus on other levers? How much longevity can we extract from sleep?
I know the ceiling is not 100% as Bryan Johnson said in an interview he has more than 4h of restorative sleep per night and that is crazy difficult for me.
My contribution would be: the biggest things in my stack have been melatonin and Ltheanine.
If anyone knows how to not wake up in the middle of the night, it will help me a lot
I’d say it’s much the same as any other aspect of diet and lifestyle. With the currently approved and available drugs/tools/methods there is a point of diminishing returns.
I’m looking for a 200%+ score if that makes sense. I’m looking for more rejuvenation in the body than normal sleep can provide.
This is simply a theory of something new we could achieve with the right inputs. To clarify I’m not doing all of these things. That list is just everything I could think of and find that may positively impact sleep after searching this forum thoroughly.
Good sleep clearly rejuvenates some aging damage, considering bad sleep will make you feel and look worse and have worse biomarkers. I’m asking if we can go beyond “good” sleep, and figure out the mechanisms behind good sleep and make it better so that we wake up biologically younger than when we went to sleep the night before.
As I searched through the forum seeing what information people had on sleep as I created this post I noticed a user with the name @Guywholikessleep, I’m wondering if he is still around and if he has any thoughts on this?
LoL, if I took all of those interventions I’d wake up in the morning with a stomach ulcer.
Sleep is certainly worth some effort and discipline. Up until my late forties I was a poor sleeper, 3 to 5 hours a night. Then I hit a wall, got advice and changed everything. I’ve been using an Oura ring since 2018 and it encourages my discipline and helps me to calibrate what works and what doesn’t.
Here are a few thoughts:
Stick to a schedule Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends. If you wake up for extended time at night, go to bed later until you sleep all in one segment. It’s counter intuitive but works.
Create a calming bedtime routine Wind down 30–60 minutes before bed with relaxing activities like reading, stretching, or listening to calm music.
Limit screen time before bed Avoid phones, computers, and TVs at least an hour before sleep—blue light interferes with melatonin production.
Watch your caffeine and alcohol intake Avoid caffeine after mid-afternoon (it has as much as a 9 hour half life for some people) and limit alcohol in the evening.
Make your sleep space comfortable Keep your room cool, dark, and quiet. Invest in a comfortable mattress and pillows.
Avoid heavy meals before bed Try not to eat large meals or spicy foods within 2–3 hours of going to sleep. I hydrate with two thirds to three quarters of my daily intake before 1pm. This means I no longer get up in the night.
Get sunlight during the day Natural light exposure, especially in the morning, helps regulate your circadian rhythm.
Be active during the day Regular physical activity promotes better sleep—but not too close to bedtime.
Manage stress Meditation and deep breathing exercises can help calm your mind.
Use your bed only for sleep Avoid working, eating, or watching TV in bed—this helps your brain associate bed with sleep.
This post isn’t a list of what I’m doing lol. It’s a list of what I could find that might be of benefit so we could try and piece together something powerful.
Its a decent book, but some misinformation about the science of sleep or general exageration of some ideas.
That book actually got me into pursuing my PhD in sleep research, and as I have been in the field I realized that a lot of what I thought about sleep from his book was not the actual case within the field. Still a decent book to read for some general help and tips, especially for the layperson.
A bit confused on what you are wanting or asking from this post.
But here’s a fun fact, did you know that there is actual local variation in sleep-wake like states in the brain, even if the global brain state seems to be either awake or asleep. In other words, we actually can have Wake like activity in some brain regions, while other regions are in NREM or REM sleep. So now sleep is more local than global.
Another thing, what is meant by restorative sleep or sleep quality?
For example, someone could have good sleep quality but bad sleep quantity, is their sleep restorative? You could have the opposite as well, where someone has great sleep quantity but bad sleep qualitiy. Hell you can have different metrics of sleep quality to measure that could differentiate(Delta power, sleep fragmentation, stage transitions, brief awakenings, etc).
Furthermore, sleep is influenced by other factors in lifestyle such as environmental, so is restorative sleep contextual? An example would be animals that undergo stress seem to have differences in their sleep quality and quantity during and following the stressor, but heres the catch, they actually have pre-existing differences before the stressor was even applied that are predictive of their ability to respond to the stressor.
Another example, could be that someone who experiences something traumatic might actually want to have a bad night of sleep vs a good night of sleep in terms of PTSD outcomes, but that might not be the case for someone who has anxiety… again lots of nuance that makes it really hard to find practices that enhance" beneficial rejuvenating effects of sleep". I do like the idea though and it is something I am actually pursuing through research. To me, we still need to figure out the whole reason for WHY we need to sleep and its purpose(which has yet to be discovered and there are severeal hypothesis in the field that aren’t convinving in my opinion).
And for me, mouth taping was a game changer. Dry mouth was waking me up at night for a sip of water. Apparently I tend to breathe through my mouth after I fall asleep. Mouth taping stops this.
You seem to know about this. Is it possible to tackle a specific aspect of sleep? My problem is always the amount of wakeups that I have. I already do all the basics: same sleep schedule every day, no food 5h before bed, exercise early, wind down routine, glycine, theanine, magnesium, etc.
We need to study the mechanics of sleep and improve upon them to increase the amount of rejuvenation we get from it. It’s an untapped area to research for the damage repair approach for anti-aging and longevity.
I don’t know all of the specifics of the science of sleep but I do know good sleep leaves you feeling rejuvenated, and there is something there we can learn from. We need to figure out drugs and technologies that enable us to sleep better so that we wake up truly biologically younger than when we went to sleep.
I thought I’d share the results of my glycine experiment last night. It could be a fluke, but I was too impatient to wait for more tests before sharing.
I’ve been taking some glycine routinely for a year. There are 600mg in my NACET that I take early in the day, and I’ll often put 1000mg of glycine in a protein shake that I’ll usually have before 3pm.
Last night, I took my highest dose of glycine yet and put 2000grams in a protein shake that I had at 6:30pm (I rarely eat that late).
My sleep was off the charts. I slept for 9:27, 1:32 deep sleep, 3:19 REM
I typically don’t take much glycine at the end of the day (just a little in my magnesium pill that I take before bed) because I take my taurine then and many say don’t take them together, so I am left a little confused.
Yeah the problem is, the field is still figuring out the mechanisms of sleep.
I guess the main point my original post was trying to get at, was that we have no idea what causes an aspect of sleep to be rejuvinating for someone. There is too much variance within individual sleep (not to mention sex differences). Again, for example you may not be sleeping enough. So the question becomes why? Is it because you are sleeping against your endogenous circadain rhythm(shift work)? Is it your sleep hygeine? Is it that for some reason you are not accumulating enough sleep drive? What if you are sleeping enough, but you sleep is fragmented and thats why you dont feel rejuvenated? Not to mention other factors such as age, lifestyle, environmental or genetic components that can contribute to these issues. I could go on and on.
Again there is too much individual variance in what could be leading to bad sleep quality. We have some ideas on areas that could be improved on( which is why its important to have good sleep hygeine), but outside of that it is really hard to pharmaceutically target a component of sleep that is going to give you the most “rejuvenation”. We don’t understand what causes our need to sleep, nor a lot of the mechanisms of sleep. We are still far away scientifically to get to this point effectively in my opinion.
In terms of wakeups, it can be caused by many factors. Age can be a factor, sleep apnea, you could be sleeping against your natural circadian rhythm, it could be too much water before bed, could be your are actually hungry ( or have hunger signals that you may not be aware of) since you are not eating for 5 hr before bed that could be causing you to wake up, lifestyle(such as stress from work, family, etc). It is normal to wake up throughout the night( it is known as brief awakenings), but it depends on the frequency(frequent awakenings) that would then make it a problem.
I get the variance, but when sleep works it must be doing the same (or a similar) thing across the board.
I’m only presenting this idea to get people thinking about it. It does make sense that by working with sleep we could achieve rejuvenation better than while awake. Who knows? It’s just a thought I had.
Sorry, I guess I should clarify.
I was only bring these points for the forum to take in to consideration. I think its a great idea and I do believe there is much to be learned from sleep and ways we can try to isolate components of sleep that will benefit people. But scientifically, we are far from it. I apologize if I came up against the idea, as that was not my intention. I only wanted to bring in points to be aware of and what we know research wise.
