Are you more of a team sleeper or team night owl? The question may seem trivial, but the time you go to bed can play an important role in your well-being.
This is the observation established by American researchers, who set a bedtime that should not be exceeded to preserve mental health as much as possible.
Experts and scientists are unanimous: sleep plays a vital role in physical and mental health. Concentration, mood, energy, diabetes, and even heart health: getting enough quality and quantity of restorative sleep helps maintain good health. A team of researchers from Stanford University has confirmed this today through a study that establishes an association between going to bed late and poor mental health. They go even further by recommending a bedtime that should not be exceeded to preserve one’s well-being.
Should you align yourself with your chronotype, i.e. your own biological rhythm, to stay healthy? In other words, if you have energy in the morning, do you constantly have to go to bed early to get up early, and vice versa for night owls? This is the question that the researchers tried to answer, who analyzed data from 73,888 adults aged 63.5 years on average and from the UK Biobank. Which provided information about their sleep, and particularly about their chemistry with going to bed and getting up early or late. They were also asked to use a wearable activity tracker to track their actual sleep for seven days.
The scientists note that more than 19,000 participants declared themselves to be from the morning team, more than 6,800 from the evening team, and the vast majority, namely nearly 48,000 participants, from the so-called “intermediate” team. They also specify that the data collected on sleep were combined with those from medical files concerning the mental health of the participants. Published in the journal Psychiatry Research, the findings suggest that a later bedtime, regardless of one’s bedtime preferences, is associated with higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders.
1 a.m., maximum
In a press release, the researchers explain that they were surprised to discover that ““Aligning yourself with your chronotype was not the best choice for mental health”. And having realized that it was better, at least for the night owls, not to follow the rhythm supposed to suit them best. A finding that scientists claim to have tried to refute, as it seemed so surprising to them, but in vain… “Morning and evening people who stayed up late had higher rates of mental disorders, including depression and anxiety”they had to resolve to observe.
Their findings nevertheless show a particularly increased risk of mental health disorders among participants who have the habit of going to bed late and then getting up late. The latter were 20% to 40% more likely to be diagnosed with a mental disorder compared to night owls who woke up early – or not too late. To ensure their results, the researchers tried to take into account the duration of sleep or the regularity of sleep schedules, but these two criteria did not explain the differences observed between the participants.
Aware that it is difficult to go against your chronotype, researchers nevertheless recommend going to bed before 1 a.m. to preserve your mental health. Although they do not explain the mechanism involved in this association, they believe that it could be due to the poor decisions that we are more likely to make late at night. “Many harmful behaviors are more common at night, including suicidal thoughts, violent crime, alcohol and drug use, and overeating”, we can read. And to add: “One theory, known as the ‘mind after midnight’ hypothesis, suggests that neurological and physiological changes occurring late at night can promote impulsivity, negative mood, impaired judgment and taking risks”.
