How to live longer and age better: sleep, recovery, and data

We live longer than ever. Your grandparents were born in a country where life expectancy was around 35 years at the beginning of the last century. Today, Spain is among the three longest-lived countries on the planet.

And yet, ask anyone over 70 and they will tell you the same thing. The problem is not how long you live, but how you get there. This article is about that: the healthy lifestyle habits that are genuinely backed by evidence and how to know whether what you are doing is working. 

Ministry of Health, Life Expectancy in Spain 2024, published in September 2026 with data from the INE. Healthy life years are calculated using the Sullivan method based on the European activity limitation indicator. The data are from 2024 because they are the latest definitive figures; mortality statistics have a lag of around two years.

We live longer, but we do not reach old age in better shape

Before getting into it, a note about the dates that will save you some confusion. The data you are about to see are from 2024 and are the latest definitive figures available. They are not outdated. Mortality statistics require closing the year's death register, cross-referencing it with population figures, and validating it, so they are always about two years behind. The report we cite was published in September 2026 with data from 2024.

And there is another tangle of figures worth clarifying, because you will find very different numbers depending on where you look, and both are correct.

The Ministry of Health says that in 2024, Spaniards had 80.2 healthy life years out of a life expectancy of 84.0. In other words, 3.8 years with limitations. That sounds pretty good.

Eurostat, on the other hand, puts healthy life years in Spain at around 62. A difference of 22 years. How can that be?

Because they do not measure the same thing. Both use the same European question about activity limitations, but the Ministry counts only severe limitations, while Eurostat counts any limitation, severe or otherwise. The Spanish report itself explains that it changed its criterion in 2018 precisely because the series covering any limitation was very unstable.

So the honest interpretation is this. If we are talking about years lived without a limitation that prevents you from living a normal life, it is almost 4. If we are talking about years lived with some discomfort that affects your life, even though you can continue living normally, it is many more. Both things are true, and the second is what people feel in their bodies.

A warning about comparisons between countries, because it is important. The Eurostat indicator is based on a single survey question about whether you feel limited. And people do not answer that in the same way everywhere. Consider this oddity: Bulgaria has the lowest life expectancy in the European Union yet appears among the top countries for healthy years, while Denmark is among the last. A validation conducted in fourteen European countries concluded that the indicator accurately measures perceived limitation, but called for caution when comparing its level between countries. So use it to see Spain's trend, not to create a ranking.

And from age 65 onward, the picture changes considerably

Here is the figure that interests us, from an analysis by the BBVA Foundation and Ivie published in November 2025 using 2023 data.

A 65-year-old person in Spain lives an average of 10.3 years without disabilities. They live the rest of their life expectancy at that age, 11.4 years, with some functional limitation. In other words, 52.7% of the years after age 65 are lived with some disability, and those 11.4 years are above the European Union average of 10.8.

And there is one detail that explains a lot about the difference between men and women. The years without disabilities are practically identical: 10.3 for men and 10.2 for women. What changes is the rest. Women live 3.9 more years with disabilities.

There is another figure in the Ministry's report that almost nobody mentions. Between 2006 and 2012, life expectancy in Spain increased by 1.7 years. Between 2012 and 2019, only 1.0. In other words, the rate at which we are gaining years is slowing down, and this is not unique to Spain; it is happening in many developed countries.

In other words, the easy part is already done. What remains to be gained now depends much more on how each of us lives. And that is where habits stop being magazine advice and become the main variable.

Why we live so long in Spain

If you search for this online, you will always be told the same thing. Mediterranean diet, public healthcare system, and good weather with plenty of social life.

It is not that it is false. It is that it is incomplete, and one of the three parts is considerably weaker than it appears. Let us take them in order.

What really put us on the podium

The best-documented cause is none of the three. It is the decline in cardiovascular mortality, measured using demographic decomposition techniques, which basically means accounting for which cause each additional year of life is attributable to.

Between 1980 and 2009, Spain gained more than six years of life expectancy. Of that gain, the reduction in cardiovascular mortality accounted for 63% in women and 53% in men. More than half of the total. First because of the decline in strokes and, from the mid-1990s onward, because of the decline in heart attacks.

García-González JM, Revista Española de Cardiología, 2013.

On top of that, there is something measured by the OECD that reflects well on the healthcare system. In 2022, Spain had 124 preventable deaths and 62 treatable deaths per 100,000 inhabitants among people under 75, among the lowest rates in the European Union. What is interesting is that it achieves this with per-capita healthcare spending around one-fifth lower than the European average.

And now for the uncomfortable part of the Mediterranean diet

There is something here that almost nobody mentions, and it is important.

The landmark study on the Mediterranean diet is the PREDIMED trial, published in 2013 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is behind almost all the headlines you have read. Well, that article was retracted in 2018, because an audit found problems with how participants had been assigned to groups. There were deviations involving 1,588 of 7,447 people, or 21%, including one center that assigned participants by entire clinics instead of individually.

It was reanalyzed and republished the same year. And here is the honest version. The results held up in essence, with a reduction of around 30% in combined cardiovascular events among high-risk people. But when each outcome is examined separately, the only clear benefit is a reduction in strokes. There was no significant difference in heart attacks, cardiovascular death, or overall mortality.

The Cochrane review, which is the independent arbiter in these matters, classifies it as low-quality evidence for mortality and heart attack, and moderate-quality evidence only for stroke. Its literal conclusion is that some uncertainty remains.

Estruch et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2018, republished version following the retraction of the 2013 article. Rees et al., Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2019.

The problem is that we no longer eat this way

And this is the piece that finally dismantles the narrative. The ANIBES study found that 94.6% of the Spanish population does not reach five daily servings of fruit and vegetables, and that 83.5% eats less than half a serving of whole grains per day, while consuming more meat than recommended.

The figure is worse among children. The 2023 ALADINO study, with 12,678 schoolchildren aged 6 to 9, puts childhood obesity at 15,9 %, and Spain repeatedly ranks among the European countries with the highest rates of excess weight in children. One detail should not be overlooked: in households with annual incomes below €18,000, childhood obesity is 23.4%, while in households earning more than €30,000 it falls to 10.9%.

What this means is that the traditional diet may have helped the generations who are older today, which are precisely the ones determining current life expectancy. Using it to explain the present, or as a guarantee of the future, is not supported by the data on what we eat today.

Two factors that nobody mentions but that do matter

Road traffic. In 2024, 1,785 people died on Spanish roads, 37 per million inhabitants, below the European Union average. Road mortality peaked around 1989 and has fallen dramatically since then. Decomposition analyses identify traffic accidents as one of the causes holding back life expectancy among young Spaniards in the 1980s, and their subsequent reduction as a real gain. That did not come from diet; it came from regulations, the penalty-points driving licence system, and infrastructure.

Tobacco, and especially when each person started smoking. Between 1990 and 2018, tobacco caused 1,717,150 deaths among people over 35 in Spain, 12.7% of the total. But look at the breakdown by sex, because it is revealing. It accounted for 22.3% of deaths among men and just 2.3% among women.

The reason is that Spanish women took up smoking much later. And that has a consequence worth knowing. During that same period, lung cancer mortality rose by 151.7% in women and fell by 12.1% in men. Much of the current female advantage comes from the fact that women now over 75 barely smoked, while the cohorts who did start are now reaching the ages when mortality is highest.

Directorate-General for Traffic, 2024 annual road accident report. European Journal of Public Health, 2022, trends in tobacco-attributable mortality in Spain.

And a myth worth dispelling

The wine and Mediterranean drinking-pattern myth. According to the OECD’s 2025 health profile, alcohol consumption in Spain rose from 10.4 liters per adult in 2015 to 11.1 liters in 2023, the fifth-highest in the European Union and around 10% above the European average. There is no basis for presenting Spanish alcohol consumption as a protective factor.

Healthy living habits that actually make a difference

Let’s get practical. Of everything you’re going to hear about healthy living, these are the ones backed by serious studies, ordered by what they really contribute.

Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010), Sherrington et al. (Cochrane, 2019), Bull et al. (WHO, 2020), and Li et al. (Circulation, 2018). The Li study is observational, showing an association rather than causation.

Look at what tops the list. It’s not a supplement or a device. It’s the people around you. And second is lifting weights.

Sleep

Let's start by debunking the first point. Not everyone needs eight hours. The joint consensus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, developed by fifteen experts, recommends that adults sleep seven or more hours on a regular basis. It also recognizes that the need varies from person to person due to genetics, health, and environment. 

What is associated with worse health outcomes is consistently sleeping fewer than seven hours. In a British cohort of nearly 8,000 people followed for around 25 years, sleeping six hours or less at ages 50 and 60 was associated with a higher risk of dementia than sleeping seven hours. Be careful with this: it is an association, and the authors themselves warn that short sleep could also be an early sign, not just a cause.

And there is one thing that surprises many people. Waking up during the night is normal. There are brief awakenings between sleep cycles that are usually not remembered, and the amount of time spent awake after falling asleep increases with age in perfectly healthy people. If you wake up once and fall back asleep, you do not have a problem. You have one if you cannot get back to sleep and it affects you the next day.

Recovering

Sleeping and recovering are not the same thing. You can spend eight hours in bed and get up without having recovered at all.

Recovery has to do with how your nervous system shifts from activation mode to rest mode. And that can be observed. Heart rate variability, which is the small difference in time between one heartbeat and the next, reflects that balance. When you are rested, your heart beats with more variation between beats. When you accumulate strain, that variability tends to decrease.

Here is an important nuance that hardly anyone explains. Heart rate variability is not compared with the population average; it is compared with yourself. There are healthy people with values of 20 and healthy people with values of 120. What matters is whether today's number is above or below your own normal, and you can only know that by measuring for several nights.

The same goes for body temperature or resting pulse. They are wellness indicators that provide useful information about your trends, not diagnoses. A bracelet does not detect or prevent diseases, and it is worth stating that clearly.

Understanding your body

And we come to the point where the data comes in, with a warning first.

Consumer health wearables work reasonably well for distinguishing when you’re asleep and when you’re awake. A comparison of seven devices against polysomnography, the reference test in a sleep lab, concluded that they performed well at detecting sleep and that most matched or outperformed traditional actigraphy.

But the same study points to something you should know. This is where they fail: sleep stages. A wearable estimates whether you’re in deep sleep or REM based on movement and heart rate, not brain activity, which is what truly defines those stages. So when an app tells you that you got 52 minutes of deep sleep, that’s a rough estimate. Useful for spotting trends, not for obsessing over.

From data to habit with Wellbeinn Mate

Having said all that, here’s the honest argument for measuring.

Most people who abandon a habit do so because they don’t see results. You start going to bed earlier, don’t notice anything after three weeks, and eventually give up. The problem is that you’re using the worst measuring instrument there is: your own perception, which adapts within days.

A six-week series teaches you things a feeling can’t. For example, that your recovery consistently drops on the days you eat dinner late. Or that your Friday glass of wine fragments the second half of the night, which is exactly what the literature on alcohol and sleep describes. Or that your body has its own schedule, different from the one imposed by your calendar.

That’s what the Wellbeinn Band does with the Wellbeinn Mate app. While you sleep, work, or exercise, it records your heart rate, sleep, movement, and temperature, and the app translates it into something you understand at a glance.

The first thing you see every morning is your Wellbeinn Score, a number from 0 to 100 that never stays still. It recalculates every ten minutes. It drops when you push yourself, rises during calm moments, and the app breaks down what moved it. The night you had, the meeting that stressed you out, the afternoon workout. A number you can understand, not a number that falls from the sky.

And there is one thing worth knowing from the outset. The app needs a few days to learn what is normal for you. The first figures are indicative and become more precise over time. That is not a defect; it is how any system works when it compares you with yourself rather than with an average.

Wellbeinn Band

Screen-free bracelet that measures sleep, heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature, and activity. Connected to Wellbeinn Mate, free and with no subscriptions. Five profiles and thirteen metrics that you can add, remove, and reorder.

175,00 €

View Wellbeinn Band

But there is more. You can also understand your body composition: the Wellbeinn Balance connects to the same app and gives you ten metrics every time you weigh yourself. Both, together with pressotherapy, are in the measurable health collection.

And if what is failing is your nighttime ritual

No supplement can resolve insomnia. If you have been sleeping poorly for months, the way forward is what we mentioned earlier: talk to a professional. That said, European regulations do recognize two specific things, and it is worth knowing exactly what they are, because the list of authorized claims is considerably shorter than advertisements suggest.

The Night Recovery Pack combines Magnesium Matrix and liquid Melatonin with B6. It supports your nighttime ritual; it is not a sleeping pill or a substitute for fixing your schedule.

Night Recovery Pack

Magnesium Matrix (60 tablets, 30 days) plus liquid Melatonin B6 (50 ml, 50 doses). Melatonin contributes to reducing the time needed to fall asleep with 1 mg shortly before bedtime. Magnesium contributes to the normal functioning of the nervous system.

39,90 €

View the pack

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