Do Night Owls do Better with Later Sleep Schedule?

 

Many people contend that people who naturally tend to be Night Owls do better on a later sleep schedule – meaning going to bed later and waking up later.    But is that really true?

The short answer seems to be no!    In a large Stanford University study looking at sleep habits of 73,880 adults the study concluded that it did not matter whether the time people felt they naturally wanted to sleep corresponded to when they actually did.

Instead, regardless of people’s sleep timing preference, people who stayed up late at night had higher rates of behavioral and mental disorders than those who did not.   This surprised researchers.

Researchers used movement trackers to track study participants’ activity so they would know when people actually slept along with having access to their health records to track behavioral and mental disorders. 

Here is a detailed description of the results:

·    People who described themselves as morning types, and who went to bed early and rose with the sun had the best mental health.

·    People who described themselves as evening types but who nevertheless went to bed early had the second-best mental health.

·    People who described themselves as morning types but who found themselves going to bed late "suffered, but not too much," and

·    People who described themselves as evening types and who went to bed late had by far the worst outcome, with between a 20 and 40 percent likelihood of having been diagnosed with a behavioral or mental health disorder.

On some level this should not be a huge surprise because our evolutionary heritage included rising early with the sun and laying down relatively early after the sun went down.  For hundreds of thousands or years prior to modern electricity the sun and fires were the only light we saw, and our physiology adjusted to the rise and fall of the Sun and changes in the type of light we experienced.    

In addition research shows that the majority of deep sleep occurs in the hours immediately after falling asleep so late bedtimes shorten deep sleep opportunity.    Your grandparents were on the right track when they said "each our of sleep before midnight is worth two after."    While an exaggeration earlier bed times support better overall sleep!