NUEVA YORK (HealthDay News).— People who stay awake regularly until high hours of the morning could be damaging their mental health, finds a recent study.
Regardless of whether people were morning larks or night owls, they tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late, the researchers found.
The mental health risk associated with stay up late appeared regardless of the person’s preferred sleep time, also known as chronotype.
“We found that alignment with chronotype is not crucial here, and that it is actually not good for mental health to stay up late,” said lead researcher, Jamie Zeitzera professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine in California. “The big question is why.”
These findings go against previous studies that determined that People who stick to their chronotype tend to be healthierZeitzer added.
To conduct the study, researchers followed almost 74,000 middle-aged and older people in the UK.
More of 19,000 said they were morning types, while some 6,800 identified themselves as evening type. The rest fell somewhere in between.
Participants were asked to wear an activity tracker to track their sleep for seven days. Their preferred sleep schedule was compared to both their actual sleep and their mental health, which was determined through their health records.
Mental health affected by sleep
The analysis showed that the night owls who stayed up late, in line with your preferred sleep schedule, had higher rates of mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety.
Night owls who were true to their nature were 20% to 40% more likely to be diagnosed with a sleep disorder. mental healthcompared to night owls who, however, slept like a morning person or an average person.
“The worst case scenario is definitely that people stay up late,” Zeitzer warned.
Morning larks that rose with the sun tended to have the best mental health of all, the researchers found. But if they had to stay up late, their mental health also suffered, although not as much as that of night owls.
Bad decisions
Zeitzer suspects these differences are due to poor decisions people make in the early morning hours.
Suicide, violent crime, drinking, substance use and overeating are more common at night, Zeitzer noted.
A theory called “Mind after midnight” hypothesis Maintains that Changes in the body and brain late at night can make it people become more impulsive, negative and prone to taking risksthe researchers noted.
That could explain why early risers have an advantage even if they stay up late, Zeitzer added.
“If I had to hazard a guess, morning people who stay up late are pretty aware of the fact that their brains aren’t working all that well, so they might put off making bad decisions,” Zeitzer said in a Stanford news release. “Meanwhile, the late riser is thinking, ‘I feel great. This is a great decision I’m making at 3 in the morning.’”
The increased risk can also vary depending on where in the world you are. For example, the United States and the United Kingdom tend to shut down at night, with few people awake and active.
Nights are more gregarious in Mediterranean cultures and it may be OK or even good for mental health to stay up late in those places, the researchers said.
“There may be fewer social restrictions late at night because fewer people are awake,” Zeitzer said.
The new study appears in a recent issue of the journal “Psychiatry Research.”
Recommendations for going to bed early
Zeitzer aconseja a Night owls who fall asleep before 1 a.m.but admits that it is easier said than done. Sleep patterns are stubbornly persistent.
His team plans to examine whether changing particular behaviors late at night, rather than at bedtime, could improve mental health.
“If you like staying up late and doing what people normally do at 10 p.m., but you do it at 2 or 3 a.m., maybe that’s not a problem,” he said.
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2024-07-24 08:38:10
