What Researchers Found Buried in 300,000 Sleep Surveys Is Striking

Everyone knows about the association between sleep and poor health, but many don't know why. In other words, what body parts are affected? Are some impacted more than others?

Researchers from the MULTI Consortium (led by Columbia University) used data from over 300,000 adults in the UK Biobank to study the biological aging of organs and its association with sleep.

They developed a tool called the "Sleep Chart" to map self-reported sleep duration against 23 different biological aging clocks. They used measurements from brain scans, MRI body scans, blood proteins, and metabolites.

Surprisingly, both too little and too much sleep were associated with health problems. The best daily sleep window was between 6.4 and 7.8 hours per night. The accelerated aging at the extremes showed up across the brain, lungs, liver, immune system, skin, pancreas, heart, kidneys, and more.

Short sleepers had significantly higher rates of cardiovascular disease (heart disease, hypertension, arrhythmias), type 2 diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, lung disease, musculoskeletal problems, and digestive disorders. Short sleep was also linked to higher all-cause mortality.

Oversleeping is a bit more complicated. It becomes a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Are people sleeping more because they are sick, or is the sickness a result of too much sleep?

A major caveat with this study is that people were self-reporting their sleep. People are notoriously poor at self-reporting, which is why dietary recall studies are also taken with a grain of salt.

With that said, it's still clear that sleep appears to be one of the most powerful levers we have for slowing biological aging across virtually every organ system in the body. Even if some of the self-reporting is off, we're talking about a study of 300,000 people.

The good news is that unlike your genetics or your age, sleep is something you can actually change. And since the research suggests the sleep-aging relationship is driven more by behavior than by the biology you were born with, that's a rare and meaningful opportunity.

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This story was originally published May 25, 2026 at 2:05 PM.