Casey Means, MD is a Stanford-trained physician and co-founder of Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis. Her book on metabolic health, Good Energy, comes out in May 2024 with Penguin Random House (pre-order here!). She received her BA with honors and MD from Stanford, was President of her Stanford class, and has served on Stanford faculty. She trained in Head & Neck Surgery before leaving traditional medicine to devote her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick. She has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Women’s Health, and more.
What’s your overall approach to sleep as a pillar of your health? How do you think about sleep?
Especially after diving even deeper into the research on sleep for my book,Good Energy, I can tell you sleep is one of the single most important investments we can make for our mental and physical health. The research is clear and overwhelming. And right now, we are not doing a good job at it. Compared to one hundred years ago, we are sleeping on average 25 percent less. That’s 25 percent less time for our bodies to do its critical processes of biological repair, recovery, and memory consolidation. Every time we skimp on the quantity, quality, or consistency of sleep, we inch toward the grave—and toward metabolic symptoms and diseases— by generating oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, plus a big helping of microbiome dysfunction. Lack of quality sleep is a profound “danger” signal to the body, throwing off proper metabolism and promoting fat storage. I think about sleep in three ways:
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