Still Waking At 3 A.M.?

Do you ever find yourself thinking: “I’m 52, I wake up around 3–4 a.m., and I function. Maybe I just need less sleep now.” You may have started noticing sleep changes in your 40s or 50s. By now, you may have been getting no more than 5–6 hours for years, if not decades. On top of that, you keep hearing from friends, headlines, and perhaps even clinicians that this is “just what happens with age.” Over time, it can start to feel as if your body needs less sleep and that this lighter pattern is...

A member recently asked me something that captures what so many health-conscious adults wonder but don’t always say out loud: “I sleep 5–6 hours, wake up feeling ‘fine’ once the coffee kicks in, and I still get through my day. Lately though, I need more caffeine just to stay focused. If I’m functioning on 5–6 hours, how big a deal can my sleep really be?” I’ve asked myself this same question more times than I can count. And it’s a reasonable question: A lot of smart, health-aware adults work,...

Hi there, In 2025, you received Longevity Vault articles and frameworks on sleep, bloodwork interpretation, lipids and inflammation, subclinical kidney aging, and smarter supplement choices. To help you start strong in early 2026, I pulled a curated se lection into one page you can use as your 2026 Longevity Launchpad. Inside it, you’ll find three parts: “Start here” pieces: the most foundational deep dives—use these when you want the most impact per read A small set of tools and frameworks...

The first question I ask every client about their sleep isn’t ‘How many hours?'—it’s whether they wake up feeling energized. Because, the most under-emphasized sleep metric isn’t a sleep score, REM %, or hours in deep sleep. It’s restful sleep Because many meaningful downstream consequences of poor sleep don’t show up as a bad sleep score. They show up like this: a mid-afternoon energy crash, brain fog, post-meal heaviness, and a growing requirement to nap to function. Those patterns matter...

Telomeres are protective DNA “caps” at the ends of your chromosomes. Their job is to help preserve the integrity of genetic material. When telomeres become very short, cells are more likely to enter senescence (a non-dividing, pro-inflammatory state) or lose normal function. Because of this, telomere length—is often used as a marker of biological aging. In large population studies, shorter telomeres are associated with higher risk of age-related disease outcomes and earlier mortality. So, if...

A lot of Longevity Vault members have asked me over the years: “If I just drink more water and avoid spinach, am I safe from kidney stones?”Or: “Kidney stones run in my family—does that mean I’m stuck with them?” Short answer: those things matter. Longer answer: they only touch a small part of the problem. Most kidney stones—70-80%—are calcium oxalate. So if you’re thinking about prevention, oxalate is the main variable. That sets up the more useful question: Is “water + avoiding high-oxalate...

Hi there, If someone I cared about told me they weren’t sleeping well—waking too early, can’t get back to sleep, tried everything—these are the three pieces I’d send them: 3 A.M. Wake-Ups: It’s Not Just StressMy own experience. Breathwork didn’t help. Here’s what was actually going on. Why Many Sleep Tips Don’t Work & Don’t Last The reason good advice stops working after a while. There’s a layer most people miss. Does “deep sleep” clear Alzheimer’s proteinsNew 2025 data that surprised me—and...

This is the most common sleep disruption pattern I help solve — and the one I struggled with for 10+ years and solved. You wake around 3-4 a.m. — with thoughts circling even when nothing is urgent. Even if you you're not up at 3 a.m., you wake up tired despite enough hours in bed. This is because your sleep is light and fragmented: You are skimming the surface of sleep rather than dropping into the deep repair stages your brain needs. The hours are there. The restoration is not. Many...

Dear Longevity Vault Reader: 20 years ago, I started where many of our community members start: trying to optimize health by collecting other people’s best practices. I kept meticulous notes, tracked workouts/nutrients, took supplements, read late-night threads on PaleoHacks. Back then, information was scarce—Facebook was just a social network for universities and LinkedIn was just for résumés. I was doing everything I could find. Yet I’d still have brain fog, 3 AM wakeups, and energy crashes...

Dear reader: Because Tylenol (acetaminophen) appears in so many products—from cold remedies to pain relievers/sleep aids—it’s easy to overlook how the total amount can approach the maximum daily dose without any single moment feeling notable. For context (& autism-related discussions aside)—acetaminophen accounts for roughly 46–50% of acute liver-failure cases in the United States, often from unintentional overuse when individuals combine over-the-counter products that share the same active...