Welcome to The Rise – your weekly dose of circadian sunshine, decentralised health wisdom, and actionable tips to help you live healthier, stronger, and more empowered.

It’s Sleep Week, which is like asking me to talk about one of my favourite topics. Oh wait, that’s exactly what it is, so we’re going all in. This edition we’re covering:

• Why sleeping under 7 hours is more dangerous to your lifespan than poor diet or lack of exercise
• The body clock signal that predicts your dementia risk years before symptoms appear
• The hidden truth about autophagy, circadian timing, and your cells’ midnight clean-up crew
• And we’re covering the fascinating conversation between America’s most recognised sleep doctor as he sits down with Diary of a CEO. What he says about melatonin, your 3am wake-ups, and the one habit that resets everything might just change your nights forever.

Have suggestions — or something you’d love to see covered here? Help me better serve this vibrant community of health rebels and send me your feedback here.

Much love and sunshine, ☀️
Sandy xx

P.S. Want to go deeper , faster? For the cost of a monthly chai latte, you can unlock the full Rise experience – weekly downloads, private essays, and access to the growing member vault of resources designed to help you thrive in health and life.

Issue #111 • 15 March, 2026

🌅 Rise Report

Sleep Is More Powerful Than Diet, Exercise, and Loneliness Combined

You already know sleep matters. But here’s what you probably didn’t know: it matters more than almost everything else you’re doing for your health.

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University analysed CDC data from across every US county between 2019 and 2025 — one of the most comprehensive sleep-and-longevity datasets ever assembled. When they ranked lifestyle factors by how strongly they predicted life expectancy, sleep came out second. Ahead of diet. Ahead of exercise. Ahead of social isolation. Only smoking ranked higher.

What floored even the senior researcher was the consistency of the finding. The link held across geography, demographics, and year after year of data. People regularly sleeping fewer than seven hours showed a significantly shortened life expectancy, and the effect was not subtle.

The takeaway? Seven to nine hours isn’t a lifestyle luxury, it’s your biological requirement. If you’ve been treating sleep as the first thing to cut when life gets busy, this research just handed you your most compelling reason to stop. Protect your sleep the way you protect your diet.

Your Body Clock May Be Predicting Your Brain’s Future

If you’ve ever been told you’re “just a night owl,” or noticed that your energy peaks oddly late in the day, pay attention, because new research suggests your daily rhythm might be telling you something far more important than when to schedule your meetings.

A major study published in Neurology tracked more than 2,000 older adults over several years, monitoring their daily activity patterns with wrist-worn sensors. People with weaker, more fragmented circadian rhythms were significantly more likely to develop dementia in the years that followed. Those whose activity levels peaked later in the day showed a 45% higher risk of dementia. That is not a type. That is your body clock functioning as a potential early warning system, years before any cognitive symptoms appear.

Researchers noted that circadian practices, particularly light exposure and lifestyle timing changes are all promising protective mechanisms. In other words: this is something we can actually act on.

The takeaway? This is exactly why morning light exposure is non-negotiable. Getting outside within 30 minutes of waking, even for 10 minutes, is not a wellness trend. It is a neurological investment into your future self.

Science Links Autophagy to Living Longer

You’ve probably heard of autophagy, your body’s cellular recycling process, where damaged proteins and dysfunctional organelles are identified, broken down, and cleared out. We’ve previously covered autophagy here, here and here. And it is, quite literally, your body’s rubbish collection service, and is profoundly important for healthy ageing.

Until recently, scientists weren’t sure whether autophagy was simply something healthy people happened to have more of, or whether it was actively driving their longevity. A major 2026 review in Journal of Molecular Biology has now confirmed it’s the latter.

Autophagy is causal, not just correlated, to how long and how well we age. This means, it’s not just something that’s present in people that live longer, but is the process driving the longer lifespan. Switch it off, lifespans shorten. Enhance it, lifespans extend. That’s a meaningful distinction, and it changes how seriously we need to take the things that support it.

So here’s where sleep comes in. Sleep, and consistent sleep timing, is one of the primary windows during which autophagy does its most important work. Disrupt your sleep, and you’re not just feeling tired the next day. You are directly interrupting your body’s ability to clear the cellular damage, waste, and debris that, left unchecked, can show up as accelerated ageing, neurodegeneration, and disease.

The takeaway? Protecting your sleep is protecting your clean-up crew. And the full Autophagy Action Plan drops this week in The Rise.

Sleep: Why All Sleep Is Not Created Equal

It may seem like not much is going on when your head hits the pillow tonight and you drift off to sleep. But don’t be fooled. Whilst you’re supposedly “resting”, your brain will be busier than you might imagine, moving through a carefully choreographed four-stage cycle that is, frankly, extraordinary. Understanding what’s happening in each stage might be the single most useful thing you read this Sleep Week.

Each night whilst you’re asleep, you cycle through four distinct stages in roughly 90-minute rounds.

• Stage 1 is light, transitional sleep: muscles relax, heart rate slows, and you’re easy to rouse.
• Stage 2 deepens things: body temperature drops, your brain produces bursts of activity called sleep spindles, and quiet memory consolidation begins. You’ll spend roughly half your night here. Then comes…
• Stage 3 deep, slow-wave sleep, where your body does its most serious physical repair: growth hormone is released, immune function is restored, and your glymphatic system opens up and flushes toxic proteins, including the amyloid plaques linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Finally…
• Stage 4 is REM: where vivid dreaming occurs, emotions are processed, and memories are woven into long-term storage.

Here’s the part that changes how you may think about sleep. The first half of your night is weighted toward deep sleep, the physical repair phase. Whilst the second half shifts toward REM, the emotional and cognitive restoration phase. This is why cutting sleep short by even 90 minutes disproportionately robs you of REM sleep, leaving you emotionally flat and mentally foggy.

Is sleep a state of unconsciousness? Only partially. You’re not registering the outside world, but your brain is deeply, actively alive. And whilst you’re lying still and resting, you are doing some of the most important biological work of your day.

Instead, try 4-7-8 breathing, developed by Dr Andrew Weil: breathe in for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight. Do 20 full cycles, picturing the numbers in your mind’s eye as you count. As Dr Breus puts it: “You cannot count and worry at the same time.” It crowds out that monkey mind that doesn’t stop.

Wondering how you’re going to track which cycle you’re up to without a pen and paper? Form loose fists and raise a finger each round you do. Ten up and then ten back down.

If you find holding your breath for 7 and exhaling for 8 is too hard, you can scale down to 4-5-6 while you build up the habit. Or want something completely different? Try counting backwards from 300 in threes. Mathematically it’s too complicated to allow you to worry, and boring enough to knock you out.

If that doesn’t work, try Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) which is fancy for simply lying still and calm. It’s not sleep, but an hour of genuine rest equals roughly 20 minutes of actual sleep. Your body is still benefiting. But the key word is calm. The moment anxiety creeps in, that’s your signal to get up. Go to another room (your reset station), with a dim circadian friendly light and book. The key thing is not to lie in bed teaching your brain that it’s a place of stress.

When the negative thoughts flood in, and they will because that’s what happens when we wake in the middle of the night, here’s a spiel Dr Breus suggests we tell ourselves:

“It’s okay Sandy. Looks like your body has decided to wake up. Well, this isn’t the game I was planning to play tonight. But I’m going to be fine. I’ll just lie here, let my heart rate come down, and let sleep do its thing.”

Give yourself permission to rest. More often than not, sleep will shortly follow.

And the number one tip Dr Breus gives every single patient: wake up at the same time, seven days a week. Not go to bed, wake up. Morning light sets a melatonin timer for exactly 14 hours later. Sleep in Saturday by two hours and you’ve pushed Sunday night forward by two hours. Your wake time is the single most powerful anchor your circadian rhythm has. Everything rests on it.

18°C (64.4°F): The ideal bedroom temperature for optimal melatonin production. Your body must cool down to signal your brain to release melatonin and initiate sleep — so a cool bedroom isn’t a nice preference, it’s pure biology.

The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional for personal health decisions. This post may contain affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.