Turn Your Bedroom into a Blue Zone with Dan Buettner

Dan Buettner, the explorer behind the Netflix series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, has spent nearly 30 years reverse-engineering longevity by studying places where people routinely live past 100 in good health. On this episode of Better in Bed with The Sleep Doctor, host Dr. Michael Bruce presses him on a specific question: what do the world's longest-lived people actually do when it comes to sleep, and what can a modern person realistically borrow from them? The answer is less about a rigid sleep schedule and more about environment, timing, and letting go of control.

The "Second Sleep" and the Nap as Default

Buettner describes a sleep pattern that appears consistently across the original Blue Zones—Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria, Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, California. Centenarians in these regions report sleeping about eight hours per night, but that sleep is almost never a single, uninterrupted block. Instead, it is broken into two or three periods. People tend to go to bed soon after sunset because there is little to do after dark. They wake up in the middle of the night for an hour or two—sometimes to work, sometimes to eat, sometimes to be with family—and then return to sleep until sunrise or just before. Dr. Bruce notes that this "second sleep" was common in pre-industrial America as well, and that Thomas Edison's lightbulb effectively collapsed human slee