Does sleep affect how long you live?
On this page
Yes, and when you sleep counts as much as how long. In 60,977 UK adults who wore activity trackers, the people who went to bed and got up at regular times had better survival over the next six years, and regularity predicted it better than hours slept did. Fix your wake time first.
What we’d do
Pick a wake time you can keep seven days a week, within about an hour, and hold it for a month, weekends included. Let your bedtime settle around it. Once your timing is steady, look at whether you’re getting enough hours to feel rested.
Why everyone counts hours
Eight hours is the number everyone knows, and sleep trackers lead with a total, so people chase hours, sleeping in on Saturday to make up for a short week. The newest study suggests that backfires, since sleeping in makes your schedule less regular.
The study that measured it
Most sleep research asks people how long they sleep. In 2024 a team led by Monash University in Australia used more than 10 million hours of wrist tracker data from 60,977 people in the UK Biobank, average age 63, to measure how regular each person’s sleep and wake times were.
Over about 6 years, people in the four more regular fifths had a 20 to 48% lower risk of dying than the least regular fifth. Their risk of dying from cancer was 16 to 39% lower, and from heart and metabolic causes 22 to 57% lower. The results held after adjusting for age, sex, health and lifestyle. And regularity predicted death better than sleep length did.
The simple version
An irregular schedule is like flying across a few time zones every weekend. Your body clock, which times your hormones, temperature and hunger, keeps trying to catch up with a day that keeps moving.
What about hours?
Hours still count, in both directions. A 2010 review pooled 16 studies with 1.38 million people. Short sleepers had 12% higher risk of dying, and long sleepers had 30% higher risk. These studies asked people how long they slept, and they can’t tell whether long sleep causes harm or is a sign of illness that’s already there.
How big is this, in plain numbers?
The study odds tool puts the regular-sleep result on the US life table. Of 1,000 American women aged 60, about 94 die in the next 10 years. Applying the gap between the most and least regular sleepers to that table brings it to about 50. That’s the biggest version of the result, from one observational study, so treat it as an upper end.
2 sources
- Windred DP and others, Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration: A prospective cohort study, Sleep, 2024pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Cappuccio FP and others, Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies, Sleep, 2010pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
