How to Live an Extra Ten Good Years

“How’d you like to live an extra ten years? And I’m not just talking about a decade of decrepitness tacked on at the end of life, but another ten or fifteen percent of all ages, from your twenties through your golden years. Think of what you could do with all that extra time!”

So goes the sales pitch for a new medical procedure that reduces the need to sleep in a technothriller I published last year titled Circadian Algorithms. It obviously doesn’t turn out to be quite that simple in the novel—how boring that would be—but in the real world it is possible to achieve a similar benefit, and without adverse side effects. However, it’s woefully neglected, or at least only indirectly discussed.

I’ve always been fascinated by sleep, but my extensive research and self-experimentation while writing the book taught me critical lessons about how best to approach the one-third of your life you spend asleep—or trying to sleep—that most people ignore.

The most important lesson for me was to focus on sleep efficiency.

Sleep efficiency is simply the amount of time you spend asleep divided by the amount of time you spend trying to sleep. So if you’re in bed for eight hours and get seven hours of sleep, your sleep efficiency is 87.5%. You want this number to be as high as possible because most people don’t enjoy time spent tossing and turning, and time spent on other pleasurable in-bed activities like reading or sex is excluded from the calculation.

Per 23andMe I have a genetic marker in my ADA gene that makes me an especially deep sleeper, so I have an advantage. But like with almost everything, genes only give you a starting point and account for about half the story—the rest is up to you. Over the past several years my sleep efficiency has improved to where most nights I get my needed seven hours of shuteye by being in bed for seven hours and five minutes—my sleep efficiency is 99%. (when not suffering from jet lag or other circadian disruptions like having an infant)

Contrast this 99% with the average sleep efficiency of 85–90%, i.e. those who spend eight or nine hours in bed to get seven or eight hours of sleep, respectively. The 10% higher sleep efficiency gives you an extra hour per day, which is enough time to get in shape, take up a new hobby, read a book a week, or spend more time with friends and family. You could even just lounge in bed for an hour, as I do on the rare occasions my son allows, but it would be your choice. Even a 1% improvement in sleep efficiency gives you back 5–10 minutes a day, enough time to meditate—more on this later—or chip away at anything else you wish. Small changes applied consistently over long periods of time often have dramatic effects.

Many people’s sleep efficiency is of course worse than average, resulting in 2–3+ hours spent tossing and turning. Eliminating this wasted time effectively results in many extra years of life, hence the title.

Time is among our most precious assets (along with physical and mental health, relationships, and money). And we live in an increasingly time-impoverished age. What can you do to reclaim as much of this time as possible?

It’s tempting to steal extra time by sleeping less. While you should absolutely figure out how much sleep you really need and not overindulge—again, unless you choose to—sleep (along with exercise) is the closest thing to a super drug. You want your prescribed dose, which is another great way to add literal years to your life. Sleeping less to increase productivity is usually counterproductive because the adverse effects of sleep deprivation are so pervasive that you’re better off with fewer but higher-functioning hours in the day. (read Dr. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep for an excellent and alarming summary)

Thus improving sleep efficiency is the best option.

Improving Sleep Efficiency

Some people are just genetically fucked when it comes to sleep and should consult a doctor, but most doctors and sleep experts will tell you that medicating the problem should be a last resort. All the standard sleep advice will also improve sleep efficiency, so you should start with the basics and use one of the many sleep trackers to see what works for you:

• Keep as consistent of a sleep schedule as you can. I generally shift mine back by a few hours on weekends, but hey you’ve got to live a little.
• Minimize alcohol (again, you’ve got to live a little…sometimes a lot).
• Avoid caffeine and other stimulants in the afternoon.
• Don’t use your phone for at least an hour before bed and ensure it’s in a mode that won’t disturb you overnight. Also, if you really want to find more time in the day, look at your phone’s screen time report and estimate how much TV you watch, then realize you likely have much more time available than you think.
• Ensure your bedroom is sufficiently dark, cool, and quiet.
• Find the right mattress and bedding, even if it’s expensive (“spend your money where you spend your time”).
• Understand your chronotype and try to adapt your schedule accordingly. Modern productivity culture loves early risers, but if you’re genetically not a morning person then you shouldn’t fight it. Sure, you can wake up at 4am, but if that means you need to be in bed by 8pm then you don’t have any more hours available to you than someone who is in bed from 1am to 9am. And you’ll be much better off if you maximize how much of that time is actually spent sleeping.

But sleep efficiency is really about how quickly you fall asleep, both initially and whenever you wake up during the night. Those with kids understand the importance of the right bedtime routine, and you should test and iterate to find what works best for you. I read for about 30 minutes in the dark until I can barely keep holding my Kindle, then instantly drift off.

Something excluded from most sleep advice but that I’ve found more useful than anything else is to avoid late-night brooding and rumination. Do not spend the hour before bed arguing with your spouse, doomscrolling, watching the news, or doing anything else that will get your mind spinning in the wrong direction. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, do not dwell on the coming day’s challenges. Everything seems so much worse, every problem so intractable, in the middle of the night. This is of course easier said than done, but learning to meditate is a perfect solution. You do not have to be a slave to whatever negative thoughts bubble up from the ether of your mind in the small hours. A recent study showed that meditation is as effective as prescription medication for reducing anxiety. It’s not just a Silicon Valley fad. It works.

Alrighty, well I hope I’ve at least convinced you to think about improving your sleep efficiency. What you discover could be immensely useful until the technology from Circadian Algorithms and other science fiction becomes a reality.