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Early to bed, early to rise
Research shows that maintaining a consistent sleep schedule can have major benefits for your health.
Until now, sleep advice has mainly focused on getting enough sleep, rather than when you should get it. But an analysis of data from more than 72,000 people shows that your sleep pattern may be even more important than sleep duration.
Going to bed and getting up at irregular times increases the risk of heart disease, heart failure and stroke by 26% research published in the Journal of Community and Epidemiology.
Scientists pored over data from the UK Biobank to find out how sleep schedules can affect health. They looked at activity tracking data over an eight-year period from 72,269 adults aged 40 to 79, giving each a ‘sleep regularity index’, scored based on sleep times, wake times and nighttime waking.
Those who stuck to the least consistent sleep schedule were more than a quarter more likely to have a serious adverse cardiovascular event than people with a “normal” routine. Those with ‘moderately’ irregular sleep habits were 8% more likely to experience the same serious events.
Which sleep schedule is best for health?
It’s still true that most adults should aim for between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. But duration alone isn’t enough to stave off the risks of an irregular schedule, the researchers found.
People who followed approximately the same schedule most nights per week had the lowest risk of major cardiovascular events.
Consistency is key
The study did not determine exactly how close to your ideal sleep and wake times was enough to prevent additional cardiovascular risk. But the further someone strays from this schedule, the greater the risk.
“We should aim to wake up and go to sleep at the same time within 30 minutes every evening and every morning, including weekends,” said lead author Jean-Philippe Chaput of the University of Ottawa. The Guardian. “Within an hour of the same time is good, but less good than 30 minutes, and even better is to have no variation.
“More than an hour difference each night and each morning means irregular sleep,” Chaput added. “That can have negative consequences for health. The closer you get to zero variation, the better.”
The Strange Exception ‘Won’t Kill You’
Of course, no one is perfect, Chaput said, and sleeping off your schedule one or more days a week won’t kill you.
But going to bed regularly at different times – say, five or six days a week – becomes a chronic problem. “That’s a problem,” he said.
Waking up at the same time is important
If you want to make up for lost hours, it’s better to go to bed earlier than wake up late, Chaput said.
“Waking up at a different time every morning has a major impact on your internal clock, which can have adverse health consequences,” he said, adding that it’s best to keep the same hours on weekends as the rest of the week.
How does your sleep schedule affect your health?
The study was observational, meaning it cannot prove why something happened. It can only create associations such as risk.
Other research has found a link between poor sleep and a physiological marker of inflammation, as Emily McGrath, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, who was not involved in the study, explained.
“It’s not clear exactly how sleep benefits the heart, but research suggests that disturbed sleep is associated with higher levels of a protein called CRP,” she said. the Daily Star.
“This is a sign of inflammation, the process linked to cardiovascular disease,” she said, adding, “sleep can also have an indirect impact on heart health, by influencing our lifestyle choices.”
Poor sleep can make it more difficult to exercise and leave you less time to prepare healthy meals, for example. It can also make it harder to concentrate and leave you feeling tired.