Summary: Staying up late harms mental health, regardless of natural sleep preference. By surveying nearly 75,000 adults, researchers found that people who stayed up late in the morning and evening had higher rates of mental disorders. Surprisingly, aligning with one’s chronotype didn’t matter: going to bed early benefited everyone. The study suggests turning off the lights before 1 a.m. for better mental health.
Highlights:
- Later bedtimes are linked to higher rates of mental health disorders, regardless of chronotype.
- Morning and evening types benefit from going to bed earlier.
- The study recommends sleeping before 1 a.m. for optimal mental health.
Source: Stanford
Night owls, prepare yourselves. A new study by researchers at Stanford Medicine found that following your natural tendency to stay up until the early hours is a bad choice for your mental health.
participants’ preferred sleep time, called chronotype, with their actual sleep behavior. They determined that regardless of each person’s preferred bedtime, it benefits everyone to go to bed early. Morning larks and night owls tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late.
The study, published in Psychiatry researchrecommends turning off lights before 1 a.m.
“We found that aligning with your chronotype isn’t crucial here, and staying up late really isn’t good for your mental health,” said Jamie Zeitzer, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and lead author of the study. “The big unknown is why.”
Renske Lok, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in psychiatry and behavioral health, is the lead author of the study.
How do you sleep at night?
The results do not quite match those expected by the researchers. A previous study by Zeitzer’s team suggested that women with cancer who slept against their chronotype had a shorter life expectancy.
“There’s a lot of data that says it’s very important to live according to your chronotype,” he said. “That was our expectation.”
The researchers set out to study chronotype alignment in a larger population. They looked at middle-aged and older adults in the UK, asked about their sleep, including their preference for morning or evening. They were given a wearable accelerometer (essentially a fancy activity monitor, Zeitzer said) to track their sleep over seven days.
Participants’ mental health was determined from their medical records. The researchers included any mental or behavioral disorder listed in the International Classification of Diseases.
Of the 73,880 participants, 19,065 identified themselves as morning types, 6,844 as evening types, and 47,979 as somewhere in the middle.
Their sleeping behavior was assessed in relation to the whole group. The earliest 25% were considered early sleepers, the latest 25% were considered late sleepers, and the middle 50% were considered intermediate sleepers. Categorizing sleep behaviors in this way, rather than by specific bedtimes, is more meaningful because different populations may have different sleep norms, Zeitzer said.
“If we were doing this study with college students, obviously it wouldn’t be so late at 1 a.m..”
It’s all a question of timing
When researchers analyzed the data, they were surprised to find that aligning with one’s chronotype was not the best choice for one’s mental health. It was better, in fact, for night owls to lead misaligned lives.
“I said to myself, ‘Let’s try to refute this, because it doesn’t make any sense,’” Zeitzer recalled. “We spent six months trying to refute this information, and we couldn’t.”
The results were clear: morning and evening people who stayed up late had higher rates of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety.
“The worst case scenario is definitely people staying up late at night,” Zeitzer said. Night owls true to their chronotype were 20-40% more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared to night owls following an early or middle sleep schedule.
Evening guys who followed an earlier schedule did better. Mornings following a later schedule suffered, but not too much.
Morning larks who rose with the sun tended to have the best mental health of all, unsurprisingly.
The researchers found that sleep duration and sleep pattern consistency could not explain these differences in mental health.
They also tested the possibility that it is poor mental health that causes people to stay up late, and not the other way around. They followed a subset of participants who had no prior diagnosis of a mental disorder over the next eight years.
At that time, night owls who slept late were most likely to develop a mental health disorder.
Or is it a matter of choice?
There may be many explanations for the link between sleep timing and mental well-being, but Zeitzer thinks it likely comes down to the poor decisions people make in the wee hours of the morning.
Many harmful behaviors are more common at night, including suicidal thoughts, violent crime, alcohol and drug use, and overeating.
One theory, known as the “after-midnight mind” hypothesis, suggests that neurological and physiological changes late at night may promote impulsivity, negative mood, impaired judgment, and greater grasping. of risk.
This could explain why, even late at night, morning people seem to have an advantage: they get out of their comfort zone.
“If I had to guess, people who get up late in the morning are very aware that their brains are not functioning properly and therefore may delay making bad decisions,” Zeitzer said.
“Meanwhile, the late-night person thinks, “I feel good. It’s a great decision I’m making at 3 a.m.
Another explanation could be a social misalignment with the dominant chronotype.
“Maybe there are fewer social constraints late at night because there are fewer people awake,” Zeitzer said.
This is especially true in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, where people tend to be more isolated in the evening. In a Mediterranean culture, where nights are more gregarious, staying awake might even be good for mental health.
Although Zeitzer advises night owls to go to bed before 1 a.m., he knows it’s easier said than done. Getting sunlight in the morning and sticking to a routine earlier each day of the week might change your sleep patterns, but it won’t change your chronotype. “Biologically speaking, it’s a bit like a rubber band: You take a day off and you go back to where your body wants to be,” he said.
Her team plans to examine whether certain nighttime behaviors, rather than timing per se, are linked to poor mental health.
“If you like to stay up late and do what people usually do at 10 p.m., but you do it at 2 or 3 a.m., it might not be a problem,” he said .
But what’s the fun in that?
About this research news in mental health and chronotype
Author: Nina Bai
Source: Stanford
Contact: Nina Bai–Stanford
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Free access.
“Perils of the Night: Impact of Timing and Behavioral Preferences on Mental Health in 73,888 Community-Dwelling Adults” by Renske Lok et al. Psychiatry research
Abstract
Perils of the night: impact of timing and behavioral preferences on mental health among 73,888 community-dwelling adults
Mental health is independently influenced by the tendency to sleep at specific times (chronotype) and the actual timing of sleep (behavior). Chronotype and actual sleep timing, however, are often misaligned. This study aims to determine how chronotype, sleep timing, and the alignment between the two impact mental health.
In a community cohort of middle-aged and older adults (UK Biobank, not = 73,888), we examined the impact of chronotype (based on a questionnaire), timing of behavior (determined by accelerometry over 7 days), and alignment between the two on mental, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental disorders (MBN ), depression and anxiety. , as assessed by ICD-10 codes.
Compared to early morning types with early behavior (aligned), early morning types with late behavior (misaligned) had increased risk of MBN, depression, and anxiety (p<0.001). Compared to evening types with late (misaligned) behavior, however, evening types with early (misaligned) behavior had a reduced risk of depression (p < 0.01), with a trend for MBN (p = 0.04) and anxiety (p = 0.05).
Longitudinal analyses, in which the probability of developing Again mental health disorders were associated with chronotype, behavioral timing, and alignment between the two confirmed cross-sectional findings.
To age healthily, you need to start sleeping before 1 a.m., regardless of chronobiological preferences.