United States: In the latest revelation, it is shown that going late to bed, notwithstanding whether the person is a night owl or an early bird by nature, is associated with a worsening impact on mental health, as the researchers of Stanford University stated.
More about the news
There was earlier evidence pointing to the notion that putting yourself through behavioral shifts and mirroring your sleep-wake preference type, ‘evening chronotypes’ who prefer staying awake or going to bed later at night, and ‘morning chronotypes’ who prefer to go to bed early, was good for your mental health.
As we have seen, this is called the alignment to your chronotype.
However, the new research findings surprised researchers as well that going to bed late is most probably harming the mental health of all individuals, notwithstanding their natural sleeping preferences, as it is associated with higher cases of depression and anxiety.
According to Jamie Zeitzer, the study’s senior author and a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences stated, “We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it’s being up late that is not good for your mental health,” as San Francisco Chronicles reported.
Zeitzer added, “The big unknown is why.”
What more has the study revealed?
The subjects who were owls with naturalistic schedules as well as morning people and went to sleep late had higher rates of depression and anxiety, writes the study published this month in Psychiatry Research.
However, night owls who went to sleep late were the most negatively impacted: They had between a 20 and 40 percent higher probability of being diagnosed with a mental health disorder than those Night Owls who went to sleep on an Early or Intermediate schedule.
Those early birds who go to sleep late are also not as healthy as they should be both physically and mentally; however, there is not so much deteriorating impact as the night owls.
The chronophobe thesis, referring to workers who went to bed early and woke up as soon as it started to get light, was one of the success stories.
These outcomes were identified regardless of the latter’s sleep quantities and regularity of sleep schedules, San Francisco Chronicles reported.
The analysis was conducted on 74,000 people of middle age and older adults in the UK. To track the sleeping patterns of the participants, the researchers provided wearable activity trackers for seven days straight and noted down their health records related to mental or behavioral disorders.
Out of all the participants, around one-fourth of them were identified as evening people; 9 percent of them were considered as morning people, and 65 percent of them were lying somewhere in the people.