The Hidden Architecture of Health: Sleep

How small choices changed my sleep

I almost completely stopped drinking once I noticed a pattern I couldn’t ignore: every time I had even a single alcoholic drink during the day, my deep sleep scores dropped. Late dinners did the same thing. If I ate within three hours of going to bed, my sleep became lighter and more restless, and my recovery the next day was noticeably worse.

When I cut both of those habits, my @Ultrahuman data changed before I “felt” the difference.

• Recovery scores went up.
• Focus got sharper.
• Overall energy improved.

Why tracking your own rhythms matters

These patterns are personal, and maybe your numbers won’t look exactly like mine. But the principle is the same for everyone: once you start tracking your own rhythms, you begin to see how behavior, light, and food timing quietly rewire your sleep. 

Tools like Ultrahuman, Oura Ring, WHOOP, and other wearables make this visible by turning vague impressions into concrete data on deep sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, and recovery trends over time.

Awareness is the real starting point.

What really happens during sleep

And sleep is not one thing. It’s a sequence of different biological jobs across the night.

Light sleep (NREM 1 and 2, roughly 45-55% of total sleep, spread across all cycles) is when the body starts to power down. Heart rate slows, brain activity eases off, and the foundation for recovery is laid. This stage stabilizes the nervous system and supports learning and motor memory. It’s how your brain decides what to keep from the day.

Deep sleep (NREM 3, about 20-25%, mostly in the first half of the night) is the heavy-lifting phase. Here the body repairs muscle, grows tissue, and strengthens the immune system. Growth hormone peaks, and the brain’s glymphatic system helps clear metabolic waste, a nightly cleanup operation.

REM sleep (around 20–25%, occurring mostly in the second half of the night and peaking in the early morning hours, and this is also the stage where most dreaming happens) is where emotional and cognitive integration takes place. It is critical for mood regulation, processing experiences, and hormonal balance, including cortisol, testosterone, and appetite-related signals such as leptin.

Why everyone sleeps on different schedules

Some people naturally fall asleep around 10 p.m., others only after midnight – and that isn’t about habits or discipline, it’s about biology. Sleep researchers like Matthew Walker and Dr. Michael Breus show that people consistently cluster into types: morning types, “lions” (sleep roughly 9:30–10:30 p.m., wake around 5:30–6:30 a.m.), intermediate types, “bears” (sleep around 10:30 p.m.–12:00 a.m., wake around 6:30–8:00 a.m.), and evening types, “wolves” (sleep around 12:00–2:00 a.m., wake around 8:30–10:00 a.m.). There are also more irregular types, “dolphins”, and shift workers whose sleep is constantly fragmented and pushed around by work schedules rather than their own biology.

When people spend years sleeping at times that don’t match their type – a morning type who always goes to bed too late, an evening type who is forced to wake up too early, or a shift worker whose schedule keeps rotating – studies show a similar pattern: insulin sensitivity drops at the wrong times of day, the rhythm of ghrelin and leptin shifts toward late-night eating, and markers of chronic low-grade inflammation slowly rise, even when total sleep duration stays the same. That’s why two people of similar height, build, and starting weight, who eat in a similar way, follow the same training plan, and both sleep seven hours, can end up with completely different results. One leans out and has stable energy, the other gains weight and feels drained – not because they’re “weaker”, but because their sleep is chronically misaligned with their own sleep type.

If for several days in a row you go to bed when you actually feel sleepy and wake up without an alarm, the pattern that emerges gives you a pretty accurate picture of which sleep type you really belong to.

What nocturnal erections reveal about your metabolism and hormones

One more sleep signal deserves attention: nocturnal erections. As @Bryan Johnson often points out, this is not a joke or a biohacking meme, but one of the most reliable indicators of whole-body vitality. 

For men, consistent nocturnal or early-morning erections reflect healthy testosterone production, strong vascular and endothelial function, proper nitric oxide signaling, and intact REM cycles. For women, the same autonomic mechanisms appear as increased genital blood flow during REM sleep, indicating balanced hormones, nervous system resilience, and healthy metabolic coordination. 

This signal is so important because it doesn’t depend on your will or conscious control – you can’t force it and you can’t fake it. When it starts to decline, it often signals deeper issues such as disrupted REM sleep, elevated cortisol, insulin resistance, inflammation, low testosterone, impaired vascular function, or chronic sympathetic stress.

How light and timing act as “volume knobs”

Light and timing act like volume knobs on all of this.
Blue light in the evening suppresses melatonin, delays the onset of REM, and makes sleep more fragmented. Consistent bed and wake times, on the other hand, reinforce circadian stability and make each stage of sleep more efficient.

I’m not writing this from a place of perfection. Right now I struggle to put devices down before bed – emails, sports, and media are my kryptonite. One additional test I will run during Lent of 2026 will be to cut all blue light one hour before bed, and I believe my scores will improve even more with this change.

There is also something to be said about EMF exposure in bed – it’s another concern I have over the long term. Although science doesn’t yet have a final verdict on all the consequences of chronic exposure, there are enough reasons to be cautious, because additional radiation in the bedroom likely doesn’t help the nervous system or sleep quality. One idea is to remove wireless headphones and to use airplane mode on my devices at night when they don’t need to sync, to at least reduce the overall load on the body while I sleep.

Once we see how sensitive sleep is to light, timing, and the presence of technology in the bedroom, it becomes much clearer why it is so strongly linked to metabolism and weight.

Sleep, metabolism, and weight: the hidden connection

The science behind this connection is strong. Sleep, metabolism, and weight regulation are tightly linked.

When sleep is shortened or circadian rhythms are disrupted, hormonal balance shifts:
ghrelin goes up, leptin goes down, which means more hunger and less satiety (Taheri et al., PLoS Med, 2004). Late-night eating pours fuel on that fire.

Metabolic processes themselves follow circadian patterns. When we eat “out of sync” with our internal clock, the pancreas and liver receive conflicting signals (McHill et al., PNAS, 2014). Even if calories and exercise stay the same, poor sleep leads to less fat loss, worse insulin resistance, and more inflammation (Chaput et al., Nat Rev Endocrinol, 2023).

How Eden steps in

This is exactly where Eden steps in: addressing the deeper causes of metabolic dysfunction, not just the visible outcomes.

Doctors led protocols with personalized nutrition and behavior plans, plus digital tools that track sleep, appetite, and daily rhythms. By combining therapy, rhythm, and behavior, Eden helps people reset their biological clock, improve sleep quality, and rebuild metabolic flexibility.

The core idea is simple, but almost always overlooked: Most weight-loss approaches treat sleep as an afterthought. Eden puts sleep at the center of the fight against insulin resistance, obesity, and chronic fatigue. By personalizing meal timing, optimizing satiety hormones, and treating sleep as an active therapeutic component rather than a passive background variable, Eden is not just trying to fix a number on the scale or a glucose reading.

The focus is on changing how the body behaves day by day – helping the metabolism work for you again, not against you.

From theory to practice: your 7-day sleep reset

Try this for the next 7 days:

1. No alcohol for one week
   
   
2. Last meal at least 3 hours before bed
   
   
3. No blue light (phone, laptop, TV) in the last 60 minutes before sleep
   
   
4. Airplane mode and no wireless devices in the bedroom
   
   
5. Track one metric – deep sleep, HRV, or resting heart rate
   
   
6. If you can, go to bed when you naturally feel sleepy and wake up without an alarm at least a few days in a row, just to see what your real sleep timing looks like
   
   

You don’t have to be perfect. Even two or three of these, done consistently for a week, are usually enough to move the numbers – and your metabolism will often notice the change before you do.

If you have your own tips or sleep experiments, share them in the comments. I’d love to hear what worked for you.

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