A recent large-scale study from Stanford Medicine, led by Jamie Zeitzer and Renske Lok, found that regardless of chronotype, staying up late significantly increases the risks of depression, anxiety, and other behavioral disorders.
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You enjoy spending those late evenings working through the night as a mark of pride. However, your thrilling habit of staying up late may be subtly harming your mental well-being.
Regardless of your chronotype, a recent extensive study from Stanford Medicine indicates that staying up late increases your chances of developing anxiety, sadness, and other behavioral disorders.
Jamie Zeitzer, a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study’s principal author, told The Epoch Times that the findings were quite surprising.
The Brain After Midnight
The primary author of the Stanford Medicine study, Renske Lok, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and behavioral health, told The Epoch Times that although the exact causes of early risers’ generally better mental health than night owls are unknown, we do know they are tied to the timing of sleep.
One reason, according to her, is that nocturnal activities frequently encourage impulsive and maladaptive behavior. She also said that during overnight awake, the brain functions differently, particularly in risk appraisal, behavioral inhibition, and cognitive control.
Initially, the researchers hypothesized that the greatest benefit to mental health would come from matching your sleep schedule to your biological chronotype or preferred sleep pattern. However, their examination of 73,888 persons’ data, which was published in Psychiatry Research, revealed that going to bed earlier is linked to improved mental health outcomes, regardless of whether a person usually likes the morning or the evening. When it comes to mental health, the influence of chronotype appears to be superseded by an early bedtime.
Better mental health might result from people adhering to social standards and from more people being awake at the same time, according to Ms. Lok. She went on, though, to say that because night owls don’t align with typical sleep cycles, they might have worse mental health. Despite getting little sleep, they are frequently expected to wake up early for work, which can hurt their mental health and cause grogginess and poor performance.
The “Mind after Midnight” theory is examined in a 2022 review published in Frontiers in Network Physiology. It contends that prolonged late-night wakefulness causes behavioral and cognitive dysregulation, which impairs one’s perception of reality and encourages dangerous behavior. It talks about how interruptions in the day-night cycle can lead to maladaptive behaviors such as drug misuse, violent crimes, and suicide.
The review looks at variations in mood, reward processing, and executive functioning during nocturnal wakefulness and suggests that attentional biases, prefrontal disinhibition, and altered reward processing are factors in behavioral problems and mental illnesses.
Sleep Cycles
The prefrontal cortex of night owls’ brains, which stays in a sleep-like state in the early morning, is explained in Matthew Walker’s book “Why We Sleep.” Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a doctorate in neurophysiology. This domain controls higher-order thinking, emotional control, and logical reasoning.
Mr. Walker compares the brain of a night owl that is compelled to wake up early to the cold start of an engine; it takes a while for it to warm up and work properly.
One well-known characteristic of all anxiety disorders is sleep disruption. According to a 2020 article in Nature Human Behavior, research indicates that non-rapid eye movement (NREM) slow-wave deep sleep has an anti-anxiety effect on brain networks, suggesting that NREM sleep could serve as a therapeutic target for meaningfully reducing anxiety levels.
Throughout the night, there are significant fluctuations in the proportion of REM to NREM sleep during a normal 90-minute sleep cycle. According to Mr. Walker, the balance changes in the second half, with little deep NREM sleep and a lot of REM sleep, while the first half is dominated by deep NREM sleep and very little REM sleep.
Mr. Walker claims that the process of cutting and eliminating superfluous brain connections is hampered when NREM sleep is not obtained during the first part of the night.
But Mr. Zeitzer added that research from his group suggests that night owls staying up late shouldn’t affect the depth or ratio of NREM to REM sleep.
The study’s conclusions imply that night owls’ mental health is impacted by their sleep habits regardless of how much sleep they get overall—even if they go to bed at two in the morning and sleep for a long time.
Avoiding Late-Night Pitfalls
According to the Stanford study, going to bed before one in the morning improves mental wellness. It can be challenging to establish an early bedtime, though.
In her book “Age Proof,” geriatrician and professor of medical gerontology Dr. Rose Anne Kenny wrote that vigorous exercise late at night activates the sympathetic nervous system, releasing stimulating hormones and neurotransmitters that make it harder for our minds and bodies to transition into deep sleep.
Eating and drinking late at night can also play a role, particularly if the meals and beverages contain tyramine, an amino acid that causes alertness in the brain. Among the offenders are wines, preserved meats, aged cheeses, and some beers.
Dr. Kenny discovered that tyramine enhances the production of norepinephrine (noradrenaline), a neurotransmitter implicated in the sympathetic nervous system’s fight-or-flight response. This may keep us feeling up and aware, delaying going to bed too early.
Tips for Night Owls
Dr. Kenny advises a progressive approach for night owls trying to change their sleep schedules: eat and sleep 15 minutes earlier each day until the target sleep periods are reached.
She also suggests including meals that boost neuropeptides like melatonin and tryptophan, which promote sleep. These consist of milk, cottage cheese, almonds, bananas, fatty fish, kiwis, chamomile tea, and turkey.
According to Dr. Kenny, sound stimulation techniques like listening to pink or white noise can help improve deep sleep.
Recently, GreatGameIndia reported that according to new research published in Nature, depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder are linked with ancient viral DNA known as HERVs in our genome.
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