summary: Staying up late can have a negative impact on your mental health, regardless of your natural sleep preferences. Researchers surveyed nearly 75,000 adults and found that night owls and morning types alike had higher rates of mental illness. Surprisingly, it didn’t matter what your chronotype was, and going to bed early benefited everyone. The study suggests turning off the lights by 1am to improve mental health.
Key Facts:
- Later bedtimes are associated with higher rates of mental illness, regardless of chronotype.
- Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, it’s a good idea to go to bed early.
- The study recommends going to bed before 1am for optimal mental health.
sauce: Stanford
Night owls, take note: A new study from researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine finds that following your natural tendency to stay up until the early hours of the morning may be a poor choice for your mental health.
The participants’ preferred sleep times (chronotypes) were compared with their actual sleep behaviors. The researchers concluded that going to bed early is beneficial for everyone, regardless of their preferred bedtime. Both morning types and evening types were associated with higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders when they stayed up late.
This study Psychiatric ResearchIt is recommended that lights be turned off by 1am.
“Conformity to your chronotype doesn’t matter here, and we find that staying up late is bad for your mental health,” said Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and lead author of the study. “Why that is is a big mystery.”
Dr. Renske Locke, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychiatry and behavioral health, is the lead author of the study.
How do you sleep at night?
The results were not what the researchers expected: Previous research by Zeitzer’s team had suggested that cancer patients who slept against their chronotype had shorter life spans.
“There’s a lot of data showing that living a life that matches your chronotype is really important,” he said. “That was our hope.”
The researchers wanted to study chronotype matching in a larger population. They asked middle-aged and older adults in the UK about their sleep, including whether they preferred morning or evening sleep. They were sent wearable accelerometers (which are essentially fancy activity monitors, says Zeitzer) to track their sleep over a seven-day period.
Participants’ mental health was assessed from health records. The researchers looked for any mental or behavioral disorders listed in the International Classification of Diseases.
Of the 73,880 participants, 19,065 self-identified as morning types, 6,844 as evening types, and 47,979 as somewhere in between.
Their sleep behaviors were assessed in relation to the group as a whole. The 25% who went to bed earliest were designated early sleepers, the 25% who went to bed latest were designated late sleepers, and the middle 50% were designated medium sleepers. Categorizing sleep behaviors this way, rather than specific bedtimes, is more meaningful because different populations may have different sleep norms, Zeitzer said.
“If this study was being done with college students, 1 a.m. would obviously not be that late.”
Timing is everything
When the researchers analyzed the data, they were surprised to find that aligning with your chronotype may not be the best mental health choice for everyone — in fact, night owls may be better off living a misaligned lifestyle.
“I thought, ‘This doesn’t make any sense, so let’s try to disprove it,'” Zeitzer recalled. “We spent six months trying to disprove it and couldn’t.”
The results were clear: both morning types and evening types who went to bed later had higher rates of mental disorders, including depression and anxiety.
“The worst-case scenario is that night owls stay up late,” says Zeitzer. Night owls who stay true to their chronotype are 20 to 40 percent more likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness than early risers or mid-sleepers.
Evening types who followed an earlier schedule performed better. Morning types who followed a later schedule performed worse, but not by much.
Early risers tend to be in better mental health than most, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
The researchers found that sleep length or consistency alone could not explain these differences in mental health.
The researchers also explored the possibility that poor mental health was the cause of staying up late, rather than the other way around. They followed up a subset of participants who had never been diagnosed with a mental illness for eight years.
At the time, people who stayed up late and slept late were most likely to develop mental illness.
Or is it a matter of choice?
There are many possible explanations for the link between sleep duration and mental health, but Zeitzer thinks it probably comes down to poor decisions people make in the early hours of the morning.
Many harmful behaviors, including suicidal thoughts, violent crime, alcohol and drug use, and overeating, are more prevalent at night.
One theory, known as the “midnight mind” hypothesis, suggests that neurological and physiological changes late at night may contribute to impulsivity, negative mood, poor judgment, and a tendency to take risks.
This may explain why morning people seem to have an advantage even when it’s late at night: They’re stepping out of their comfort zone.
“If I had to guess, I’d say that late-night morning people are more aware that their brains aren’t working properly, so they put off making bad decisions,” Zeitzer said.
“Whereas, night owls think, ‘I feel great. That was a great decision I made at 3 a.m.'”
Another explanation may be social incongruence with mainstream chronotypes.
“There may be fewer social constraints later in the night because fewer people are awake,” Zeitzer says.
This is especially true in places where people tend to isolate themselves at night, such as the US and the UK. In Mediterranean cultures, where the evening is a more sociable time, staying up late may also be good for your mental health.
Zeitzer advises night owls to get to bed before 1 a.m., but knows it’s easier said than done. Getting some morning sunlight and sticking to an earlier daily routine might change your sleep patterns, but it won’t change your chronotype. “Biologically speaking, it’s like a rubber band; if you take a day off, your body goes back to where it wants to be,” Zeitzer says.
His team plans to explore whether specific late-night behaviors, rather than the time of day itself, are associated with poor mental health.
“If you like staying up late and doing things at 2 or 3 in the morning that most people would do at 10 p.m., then it might not be a problem,” he says.
But what’s the fun in that?
About this Mental Health and Chronotype Research News
author: Nina Bye
sauce: Stanford
contact: Nina Bye – Stamford
image: Image courtesy of Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Nocturnal Dangers: The Impact of Behavioral Timing and Preferences on Mental Health in 73,888 Community-Dwelling Adults” by Renske Lok et al. Psychiatric Research
Abstract
Nighttime dangers: The impact of behavioral timing and preferences on mental health among 73,888 community-dwelling adults.
Mental health is independently influenced by one’s tendency to sleep at certain times (chronotype) and actual sleep timing (behavior). However, chronotype and actual sleep timing often do not match. This study aims to clarify how chronotype, sleep timing, and the match between the two affect mental health.
A cohort of community-dwelling middle-aged and older adults (UK Biobank, yeah We investigated the effects of chronotype (questionnaire-based), timing of behavior (measured by accelerometer over a 7-day period), and the alignment between the two, on mental, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental disorders (MBN), depression, and anxiety, as assessed by ICD-10 codes, in a sample of 114 people (p < 0.05).
Compared to morning types and early behaviors (congruent), morning types and late behaviors (incongruent) were at higher risk for MBN, depression, and anxiety (p<0.001). However, compared to evening types and late behaviors (congruent), evening types and early behaviors (incongruent) were at lower risk for depression (p<0.001).p < 0.01), MBN (p = 0.04) and anxiety (p = 0.05).
In the longitudinal analysis, Newly Cross-sectional studies have confirmed that psychiatric disorders are associated with chronotype, timing of behavior, and the consistency between the two.
To age healthily, you need to start sleeping before 1am, regardless of your chronobiological preferences.
