Too Little or Too Much Sleep Can Speed Up Aging

Quality sleep is just as important as food and water when it comes to our survival, yet how many of us are getting enough of it? With over 16% of the global population dealing with insomnia, people are clearly sleeping too little, but they may also be sleeping too much, and this may be speeding up the aging of nearly all their organs.

Biological Aging and Sleep

“Sleep is fundamental for healthy aging and longevity. More importantly, it is potentially modifiable,” explains Junhao Wen, PhD, an assistant professor of radiological sciences at Columbia University.

Unlike chronological aging, which measures your time on Earth, biological aging refers to how quickly your cells and tissues are aging, and if they age too quickly, you increase your risk for chronic disease. One of the factors that can influence biological aging is sleep, and in a recent study, Wen and his team measured biological aging clocks across organs to link these clocks with sleep duration.

“Everyone is excited by these aging clocks and their ability to predict disease and mortality risk,” Wen says, “but to me, the more exciting question is, can we link aging clocks to a lifestyle factor that can be modified in time to slow aging?”

Not only is sleep vital for longevity, but Wen also adds that he is a light sleeper, and he was getting worried about the effects on his health.

Aging clock

To build the aging clock, Wen analyzed data collected from around 500,000 participants between the ages of 37 and 84, who reported on how long they typically slept each night. Wen and his team then compared the sleep data with the participants’ biological ages.

To determine biological age, the researchers used 23 different aging clocks, each tuned to a specific organ system or data type, including the brain, lungs, liver, immune system, skin, heart, pancreas, fat tissue, and more.

“In the liver, for example, we have an aging clock built with protein data, an aging clock of metabolic data, and an aging clock of imaging data,” Wen explains, “This allows us to see whether sleep is distinctively associated with aging clocks derived from multiple omics and molecular layers.”

The team also assessed whether sleeping for a longer or shorter period of time was associated with early mortality and disease.

Sleeping too little or too much is aging the body

“Our study goes further and shows that too little and too much sleep are associated with faster aging in nearly every organ, supporting the idea that sleep is important in maintaining organ health within a coordinated brain-body network, including metabolic balance, and a healthy immune system.” – study leader Junhao Wen

According to the findings of the study, published in Nature, 9 of the 23 clocks showed that both short and long sleep were associated with higher biological age gaps compared to people who were sleeping a normal amount.

According to the data, a normal amount is considered between 6.4 and 7.8 hours per night, though the range does shift depending on the organ measured and the sex of the person.

Sleeping too little

The study defined short sleep as fewer than 6 hours, and found it was linked to:

• Cardiovascular disease
• Hypertension
• Arrhythmia
• Asthma
• Obesity
• Kidney disease
• Type 2 diabetes
• Low back pain
• Osteoarthritis
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Substance use disorders

Sleeping too much

Long sleep, defined as sleeping for more than eight hours, has more brain-related dangers compared to short sleep, and they include:

• Major depressive disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Bipolar disorder
• ADHD

As for the mortality risk, both short and long sleepers faced a mortality risk, with short sleepers having a 50% higher hazard of death and long sleepers having a 40% higher hazard.

Changing how we sleep

Despite the findings, the researchers do reiterate that the sleep duration was self-reported. Also, the study does not rule out the possibility of underlying diseases causing sleep disruptions.

However, an analysis designed for detecting direct genetic causation did not find strong enough evidence that the disease can cause abnormal sleep patterns, so the researchers hypothesize that our sleep duration is mostly influenced by environmental factors and therefore modifiable.

With that, here are sleep tips to help you improve your sleep habits and protect your biological age:

1. No eating or exercise after 7 PM
2. Stick to a consistent bedtime – even on weekends
3. Track your sleep to identify patterns, not diagnose
4. Have a wind-down routine: 30–60 minutes before bed, unwind and have screen-free time

Want to know more?

To help us better prioritize our sleep, Discovery, a global financial services company founded in South Africa in 1992 by Adrian Gore, released a groundbreaking report that will help us sleep better.

References

Benjafield, A. V., Sert Kuniyoshi, F. H., Malhotra, A., Martin, J. L., et al. (2025). Estimation of the global prevalence and burden of insomnia: A systematic literature review-based analysis. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 82, 102121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2025.102121

Kate, C., Song, Z., Anagnostakis, F., Yang, Z., et al. (2026). Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life. Nature, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10524-5