Andrew Huberman· PhD
The first is that if you look at some of those populations, the idea is that the whatever was causing them illness and took their lives was just too much for sleep to deal with. However, we know that when we get sick, one of the things that we do immediately in this whole mechanism and inflammatory mechanisms cytokine mediated, when we get sick, we want to sleep more. We just want to curl up in bed and you know, sleep it off. So the argument there is that it's not that sleep was killing people prematurely, it was that these people were calling on this the help of sleep, they were calling on this thing called the Swiss Army Knife of health, that is sleep. But whatever it is that they were facing was just too powerful for sleep to overcome. So it artificially looks as though more sleep leads to a higher risk of death, when sleep is actually responding to the mortality risk, and it lost the battle.