Sleep Doesn't Have to Get Worse With Age | Dr. Rebecca Robbins

Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer, and better.

Dr. Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Sleep Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where her research spans sleep's relationship to cognitive function, cardiometabolic health, and long-term brain health. She's published more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, co-authored Sleep for Success!, and her work is exactly the kind of research most of us never hear about until someone frames it the way she does here.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why sleep really does shift around age 38 to 40, and what that shift does and doesn't mean for you
• The neuroscience discovery of the brain's overnight "wash cycle," and what Dr. Robbins's own eight-year study found about sleep complaints and dementia risk
• Why jumping your bedtime back an hour almost never works, and the fifteen-minute method that does
• The at-home test Jonathan didn't realize he'd already run on himself
• The "sleep divorce" reframe one of Dr. Robbins's patients calls a "sleep marriage," and what it means for couples

If you've quietly decided your sleep is just what it is at this stage of life, this conversation will change what you think is actually possible tonight.

You can find Rebecca at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Tommy Wood to talk about what the research actually shows about keeping your brain sharp across decades, including which levers matter most, what's mostly noise, and what you can realistically start tomorrow, whether you're 45 or 65. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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