A new study suggests that people who stay up late are more likely to suffer from mental health disorders. Explanations.
Should we Go to sleep early to preserve our physical and mental health ? In any case, this is what this recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research suggests. People who regularly go to bed late, i.e. after 1 a.m., are more likely to suffer from mental health disorders like depression and anxiety.
To reach this conclusion, researchers analyzed sleep and health data from 73,888 British people. They compared their chronotype Or manifestation of circadian rhythm which defines a person’s preference for activities rather early in the morning or rather late, in short, early nighters and night owls. Of the participants, 19,065 were morning people, 6,844 were evening people, and 47,979 were in the middle.
Some brain functions are more vulnerable to sleep loss than others.
The night owls were 20-40% more likely to have a mental health disorder diagnosis compared to those who went to bed early or in between, the researchers found. The hypothesis to explain these results would be that going to bed late would cause a mismatch between our body’s internal clock and the outside world. This inadequacy makes it difficult to fall asleep, maintain sleep and impairs its quality, but also leads to chronic lack of sleep. This can trigger mental disorders like anxiety and depression.
But this study includes certain limits. “ Subjects are mostly white and middle-aged or older”, Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula told Huff Post. In addition, chronotype was determined solely from a questionnaire sent to participants.
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