What Time to Go to Bed to Protect Mental Health: What the Science Says

Research from Stanford University suggests that night owls and early risers may have higher rates of mental health problems if they sleep in later.

Those who identify as night owls and prefer to stay up late every day should know that their habits are likely to have future effects. And according to a Stanford University study, The natural tendency to stay awake until the wee hours of the morning could be a bad choice for your mental health.

The study compared the timing of dream preferred and actual sleep behavior of nearly 75,000 adults. The results indicated that regardless of preferred bedtime, it was more beneficial for everyone. sleep early.

The best time to sleep

The research, recently published in the journal Research in psychiatry , suggests that the ideal time to turn off the lights and start sleeping is at 1am .

In a previous study by the Stanford team, it was identified that women who suffered from cancer and who went to bed at times contrary to their chronotype could have a shorter life expectancy.

“There’s a lot of data that shows that it’s very important to live in accordance with your chronotype. “That was our expectation.” Jamie Zeitzer, a psychiatry and behavioral sciences scholar and lead author of the research, explained in a statement. For the same reason, these results surprised the researchers.

Getting enough sleep is one of the most essential habits for taking care of your health.

The team’s initial goal was to analyze chronotype alignment in a large group. To do this, they focused on adults in the United Kingdom and asked them about their sleep habits, such as whether they preferred to go to bed later or earlier. In addition, they tracked their sleep for a week with a wearable accelerometer.

Participants’ mental health data were obtained from their health records. Any mental health or behavioral disorders listed in the International Classification of Diseases were considered by the researchers.

Of the 73,880 participants, 19,065 were identified as morning types, 6,844 as afternoon types, and 47,979 as intermediate types.

Regarding the sleep behavior of individuals, the earliest 25% were identified as early sleepers, the latest 25% as late sleepers, and finally the middle 50% as intermediate sleepers.

Once the team started analyzing all the data they obtained, they were faced with a different result than they expected: Aligning with your chronotype may not be the best choice for taking care of your mental health. Even in the case of night owls, it was best not to align them with their preferred sleep time.

“I thought, ‘Let’s try to disprove this, because it doesn’t make sense,’” Zeitzer said. Despite attempts to disprove it, it wasn’t possible. The results clearly show that night owls and early risers, who tend to sleep late, have higher rates of mental health conditions.

“The worst case is definitely that people stay up late,” added the study’s lead author.

In the case of night owls who aligned with their chronotype, it was identified that they could be between 20% and 40% more likely to be diagnosed with the disorder, compared to night owls who tried to align with an early wake-up or intermediate sleep schedule.

And which group had the best mental health? According to the study, it was early risers go to bed earlier.

Source: Latercera

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