Well, not sleeping well can be theoretically fixed by an intervention that makes good sleep possible. That “fix”, is not a mimetic; a mimetic is a substitute that fulfills the same function through different means. It’s the difference between a sleeping pill that enables you to sleep (question: how restfully, and what are the side effects), and a pill you take so that you get all or most of the benefits from sleeping, but not actually having to sleep.
I don’t believe there can be mimetics for all human body functions. Take exercise. We’ve heard forever about the search for an exercise pill, pop a pill and get all the benefits of exercise without actually exercising. That will never happen. Sure, you might get some benefits from an exercise mimetic - muscle hypertrophy, endurance, vo2max etc. but some you will never get.
When you exercise, you also develop complex neural connectors within muscles that you only get with entraining, which allows you to CONTROL your muscle in complex ways. You can get big muscles, but your neurons need to learn how to control that muscle - and a pill can’t do it for you. Even more profoundly, exercising connects your CNS - central nervous system - (your brain) to your muscle control in incredibly complex ways. You become a tennis player by learning the skill, training, essentially exercising - no pill can teach your body to become a basketball player, or indeed how to even simply LIFT a weight at a gym as you EXERCISE, that’s a skill, a concerted effort of many muscles, balance and prioperception, none of which will ever come from a pill.
This is why I don’t believe in an exercise mimetic - at best you can mimic a few aspects - muscle hypertrophy even CV fitness, but that’s a small fraction of what exercise does.
I believe the same is even far more true of sleep: sleep is strictly essential the way exrecise is not. You can put a man in an iron lung, where he can live for decades with zero exercise, not even using muscles to breathe. But deprive someone of sleep completely, and they DIE, and die far sooner than from complete lack of food. We spend a third of our lives sleeping - clearly something insanely essential is happening for the body to devote this much effort to it. And incredibly complex, far, far, far more complex than exercise, with endless processes of memory formation, function of dream creation and so on, endlessly. I don’t believe for a second that there will ever be a pill or some mimetic you pop and substitute that for sleep. If you can’t even do that for exercise, how will you ever do it for sleep? Not a chance.
They might sooner find a mimetic for breathing… so, good luck, but a mimetic for sleep ain’t happening.
