The REM Sleep You're Not Getting Could Be Killing You

Okay, we all know that REM sleep is important, so maybe the headline is a little sensationalized; but the data don't lie. Dr. Eileen Leary joins the show this week to talk about a fascinating look at nearly ten thousand people, that points to a reduction in REM sleep as a risk factor for mortality.

One of the things that's fascinating about this data is that Eileen tried - repeatedly - to come up with another way to explain what she found. Instead, she can quantify the risk of all-cause mortality that you sign up for when you don't get enough REM sleep.

Couple that with the work Laura Bojarskaite is doing at The University of Oslo looking into the glymphatic system and REM sleep, and suddenly we see a picture starting to materialize where deep sleep isn't the holy grail after all. (We talked to Laura on the September 7 episode of The Snooze Button podcast.)

Additionally, Dr. Michael Grandner from The University of Arizona talks about amateur epidemiology, and Dr. Seema Khosla from The North Dakota Center for Sleep talks COVID nightmares. We also have an update for Seema about how in love we are with the new Dreem 2 headband (affliate link) that she sent our way, and the changes in REM sleep it's measuring compared to the Fitbit Versa 2.

 

Here's the link to Eileen's dissertation at Stanford.

Perhaps better suited to North American attention spans, here's the infographic version of Eileen's REM sleep study.

Note: As I'm writing my book and researching which "hacks" worked and which didn't, I'll be tracking my sleep with a Dreem 2 headband. The people at Dreem didn't give me a tracker to use; far from it, in fact. However, if you click this link or the one above and end up getting a Dreem 2 headband of your own, I get a tiny little "thank you" check from them.

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