Sleep Tracking, For Five Million Nights

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In A Rush?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Some of us will tend towards sleeping (or not) at different times of day, but there’s more to one’s sleep type than that.

  • Today’s main feature looks beyond the pop-science sleep phenotypes (often labelled with various animal names), to a study that instead looks at 5,095,798 nights of data to produce a detailed 4-dimensional sleep map.

  • This is important, because they learned that when you change sleep type can be as important as what sleep type you have in the first place—to the point that it could be used as an early warning of disease.

• Looking to skip the alcohol this summer, and want a non-alcohol “social lubricant”?

  • Today’s sponsor WYNK is offering a low-dose, hemp-derived 1:1 THC:CBD zero-calorie seltzer, for all the feel of summer, with no hangovers!

• Today’s featured recipe, Jamaican coconut rice, is a versatile dish that can be enjoyed hot or cold, as a main or as a side. It has carbs, proteins, healthy fats, fiber, as well as an array of healthy phytochemicals. Not to mention, a great taste!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

Would You Recognize These 7 Invisible Eating Disorders?

Whether in yourself or a loved one, here are the things to be aware of:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Wildcard Wednesday

5 Sleep Phenotypes, By Actual Science

You probably know people can be broadly divided into “early birds” and “night owls”:

Early Bird Or Night Owl? Genes vs Environment

…and then the term “hummingbird” gets used for a person who flits between the two.

That’s three animals so far. If you read a book we reviewed recently, specifically this one:

The Power of When – by Dr. Michael Breus

…then you may have used the guide within to self-diagnose your circadian rhythm type (chronotype) according to Dr. Breus’s system, which divides people into bears, lions, wolves, and dolphins.

That’s another four animals. If you have a FitBit, it can “diagnose” you with being those and/or a menagerie of others, such as giraffe, hedgehog, parrot, and tortoise:

How Fitbit Developed the Sleep Profile Experience (Part 2 - Sleep Animals)

Five million nights

A team of researchers recently took a step away from this veritable zoo of 11 different animals and counting, and used a sophisticated modelling system to create a spatial-temporal map of people’s sleep habits, and this map created five main “islands” that people’s sleep habits could settle on, or sometimes move from island to island.

Those “five million nights” by the way? It was actually 5,095,798 nights! You might notice that would take from the 2020s to the 15970s to complete, so this was rather a matter of monitoring 33,152 individuals between January and October of the same year. Between them, they got those 5,095,798 nights of sleep (or in some cases, nights of little or no sleep, but still, they were there for the nights).

The five main phenotypes that the researchers found were:

1. What we think of as "normal" sleep. In this phenotype, people get about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for at least six days in a row.

2. As above for half the nights, but they only sleep for short periods of time in bouts of less than three hours the other half.

3. As per normal sleep, but with one interrupted night per week, consisting of a 5 hour sleep period and then broken sleep for a few more hours.

4. As per normal sleep generally, but with occasional nights in which long bouts of sleep are separated by a mid-sleep waking.

5. Sleeping for very short periods of time every night. This phenotype was the rarest the researchers found, and represents extremely disrupted sleep.

As you might suspect, phenotype 1 is healthier than phenotype 5. But that’s not hugely informational, as the correlation between getting good sleep and having good health is well-established. So, what did the study teach us?

More specifically,

…and, which gets to the absolute point,

In other words: if your sleep pattern is not ideal, that’s one thing and it’d probably be good to address it, by improving your sleep. However, if your sleep pattern changes phenotype without an obvious known reason why, this may be considered an alarm bell warning of something else that needs addressing, which may be an underlying illness or condition—meaning it can be worthwhile being a little extra vigilant when it comes to regular health screenings, in case something new has appeared.

Want to read more?

You can read the paper in full here:

Five million nights: temporal dynamics in human sleep phenotypes

Take care!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between cherries and blueberries—we picked the blueberries (click here to read about why), as did 78% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Recipes Worth Sharing

Jamaican Coconut Rice

This is a versatile dish that can be enjoyed hot or cold, as a main or as a side. It has carbs, proteins, healthy fats, fiber, as well as an array of healthy phytochemicals. Not to mention, a great taste!

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier – by Kasley Killam, MPH

We can eat well, exercise well, and even sleep well, and we’ll still have a +53% increased all-cause mortality if we lack social connection—even if we technically have support and access to social resources, just not the real human connection itself. And as we get older, it gets increasingly easy to find ourselves isolated.

The author is a social scientist by profession, and it shows. None of what she shares in the book is wishy-washy; it has abundant scientific references coming thick and fast, and a great deal of clarity with regard to terms, something often not found in books of this genre that lean more towards the art than the science.

On which note, for the reader who may be thinking “I am indeed quite alone”, she also offers proven techniques for remedying that; not in the way that many books use the word “proven” to mean “we got some testimonials”, but rather, proven in the sense of “we did science to it and based on these 17 large population-based retrospective cohort studies, we can say with 99% confidence that this is an effective tool to mediate improved social bonds and social health outcomes”.

To this end, it’s a very practical book also, and should bestow upon any isolated reader a sense of confidence that in fact, things can be better. A particular strength is that it also looks at many different scenarios, so for the “what if I…” people with clear reasons why social connection is not abundantly available, yes, she has such cases covered too.

Bottom line: if you’d like to live more healthily for longer, social health is an underrated and oft-forgotten way of greatly increasing those things, by science.

Click here to check out The Art And Science Of Social Connection, and get connected!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a healthy day followed by healthy sleep,

The 10almonds Team