So reading the actual paper suggests that the article's summary and title is poor / clickbait. This paper does not go into much testing of changing the wake time. Instead it looks at correlations of life-long earlier wake times and suggests that studying the article's claimed effect (earlier sleep times) could be worthwhile.
Several TL;DR quotes:
>Our data are consistent with results from a recent randomized clinical trial7that shifted the sleep timing of individuals withan evening diurnal preference. The multifaceted intervention targeted sleep timing, meal timing, light exposure, caffeine in-take, napping behavior, and exercise behavior. This intervention resulted in a mean 2-hour advance in sleep-wake timing and advanced the dim light melatonin onset, a circadian rhythm timing marker. There was no effect on sleep duration or the time between sleep onset and dim light melatonin onset timing,which suggests the absence of sleep deprivation or worsening of circadian misalignment as a consequence of this intervention.7Participants allocated to the intervention arm had improvements in the overall Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale score, as well as the depression and stress subscale scores.
>While this trial also lends support to a causal protective effect of morningness on mood,the study was small (n = 22) and did not assess hard clinical endpoints. In contrast, our analysis tested the association with life-long modification of diurnal preference and assessed the clini-cal end point of MDD diagnosis. Taken together, our results suggest that interventions such as those implemented in this trial7may be worth scaling to larger clinical trials
>This 2-sample MR analysis found robust genetic evidence for a protective association between earlier diurnal preference with lower MDD risk, and contextualized this association using an objective sleep timing measure. The findings support further investigation in the form of randomized clinical trials of sleep timing interventions for the prevention of MDD.
>“We live in a society that is designed for morning people, and evening people often feel as if they are in a constant state of misalignment with that societal clock,” said Daghlas.
This certainly resonates with me...I've long been quite a night owl, very much so in my teens (with long periods where I was sleeping from 5am to 1pm if left to my own devices) and much less so now in my 30s, but each transition–to college or more flexible jobs–that gave me more control over my schedule and when my days would start also coincided with feeling a lot better about myself.
It is not an exaggeration in the slightest to say that many people will treat you badly, joke about you and mock you to your face if you have trouble getting out of bed before 9 or 10am. I thankfully never struggled with depression around it and have had very flexible work schedules, but I can totally appreciate how the circumstances of being someone whose sleep schedule doesn't line up with society's expectations can really wear on a person.
As a lifelong nightowl, I switched to mornings almost 2 years ago and it’s been great.
Rather than bed at 2am, sleep till 10, I wake up at 5:30am and fall asleep at 10 simply by being tired enough.
The result is that I get better sleep, need less caffeine, have more effective creative time for personal projects, and put my stuff first before the brain is full of work stuff. Oh and the girlfriend says I’m less cranky, more pleasant to be around, and she loves that we go to bed together.
The insight that made it happen: If I can switch to a 9 hour different timezone, why not to waking up early? Body just cares which timezone your circadian rhytm is in, not where you are physically.
Doesn't work for me, sure, I can drive myself to exhaustion but my day simply doesn't feel right. Morning is usually fine for 2 hours, followed by waves of exhaustion.
There is something about the night that boosts me and fascinates me, it feels like it is my world. And it has been the case since early childhood, even before I can remember according to my parents.
And it is not just about the sun. I love the feeling of being the last one standing, the calm after everyone went to sleep.
I also asked myself the same question about timezones and also DST, why can't I be a morning person when I can naturally adjust to clock change? And I came to the conclusion that there is a lot more than the clock.
I think it has to do with what I would call "social pressure".
During daytime you have to be ready for a phone / doorbell to ring, a package to be delivered, a package by a neighbor who isn't there being brought to you, an e-mail reaching you, which demands attention, et cetera. It's louder outside. In front of your house kids might play, a dog might bark, traffic is heavier, gardening work is going on,... it feels like a world for extroverts and there is the risk of something demanding your immediate attention while you don't feel like it. There is a "societal" pressure on you to be functioning.
And at night, it's the opposite.
You can finally relax, focus, you know nothing of that will happen. You feel safe knowing that people around you are sleeping. No one expects anything from you during these hours, because it's the designated time for sleep. What you do now is outside of anyone's expectations, it's your time, your time alone. No commitments, freedom, and focus.
So I wonder if night owls are predominantly introverts with some form of social anxiety (whether they realize it or not) and I certainly think there's a large overlap there. I'm speculating, and I am sure it's not true for plenty of people, but it certainly describes me.
No matter how early (or late) I get up, my day is not done until 3-4am when I had time for myself without the bothering of others/society's expectations.
During the week, I'll sleep 5-6h and start to work, on the weekend I'll pay my sleep debt and sleep 10-11h.
I feel like that if I get up early enough. (I'm a night owl but my sleep is all over the place.)
Getting at 2-4am, feels great, like there's plenty of time and the hordes are fast asleep, or going to sleep. Finally I have a stretch of time to get some real work done
Getting up at 7am doesn't have any of that benefit. There are too many people around by then.
> There is something about the night that boosts me and fascinates me, it feels like it is my world
This is exactly why I used to stay up all night and why I now wake up early. Same feeling of aloneness and serenity, except the brain is nice and fresh full of your own thoughts instead of everybody else’s crap. Hardest part is staying away from thought pollutants for the first 3 hours of the day.
I’ve found that early mornings are the best when I need to write while late nights are better for programming. It may be that running on deadline-induced adrenaline and caffeine pushes me to turn off my internal editor and write, while I need the low-energy calm of a late night to stay focused on my code and only my code.
Same happens to, and I realized that I am wasting my life procrastinating during working hours and being able to work only during deadline-induced adrenaline, as you formulated it.
Now I am thinking to get some profet help, since others on HN mentioned that this is possible.
This is why I simply sleep during the day: if you wake up and appear after everyone else starts "closing up shop" (around 3-4pm usually) then there is no way for them to fill your head with their "crap"; the secret is that it is absolutely imperative that you go to sleep before they start waking up (which has been a bit hard recently as I am working with someone now who lives on the other coast and wakes up early enough that they can sometimes catch me before I commit to going to sleep at 6 or 7).
That is a great way of framing it. My own sleep habits are definitely sustained by my thoughts around night time, relaxation, solitude, etc. I’m not sure why, thanks to your comment, I’m just now realizing that the early morning hours are a good approximation of being awake at 3am.
Works for me during summer and if I go into the office early. Doesn't work during winter (thought of getting up in the cold is a strong deterrence) and doesn't work if I don't go into the office (the kids hear me and decide to get up early).
At night, I have no distractions and if it's cold I'm already rugged up.
I used to think I was the same, but I realised (embarrassingly slowly), that every time I went camping/hiking away from artificial light I would just go to a natural sleep cycle. It was artificial stimulation all along, I wasn't really a night owl.
This - the startup industry is full of late night owls and spike-oriented because they are kept awake by screen light and by the contraption they are mentally building.
And this sounds ridiculously lazy to physical workers, and even to my former self, when I woke up at 4.30 in Australia to cut the first trees at 6:00 ;) That was the only moment of my life where I wasn’t depressed. Maybe this blue light has a very palpable effect on sleep cycles and depression, after all.
we must have always needed night owl and early riser humans to serve as watchers of our sleeping civilizations for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and our genome is adapted to the need. Do you think so?
Last theory I heard it's why we have depressed people and asperger/autism: all qualities fitted to perform some edge functionalities (being alone at night, extreme dedication to problem solving,etc.).
Anyway, seriously: just because our genomes stir us to it doesn't mean it's good for the individual.
There’s a potential study for someone out there - see if descendants of nomadic tribes have less of a variance in circadian rhythms as opposed to people descending from static tribes.
Do you also feel much more creative and confident at this time? Personally I feel like there is a sort of weak hypomania that kicks in right after bedtime if I let it. It can be fairly irresistible, especially when under stress and having trouble sleeping anyway.
I had the same feeling but like much else in life it turned out to be adaptable. I find similar feelings from mornings while the world is asleep.
As someone else mentioned, if I camped without artificial light I would get tired at eight. So I switched my evening routine to only use lamps, created a wind down routine, and now I get sleepy around ten and don’t feel good if I stay up.
Feel free to stick with your schedule. But if it is causing you trouble you are probably more adaptable than you think.
I’m right there with you. I can go to bed early and wake up early, but I straight up feel gross/sick/off until my normal wake up time, don’t feel great the rest of the day, and my peak hours are after 10pm so I’d miss out on them.
It has dominated my life choices and I wish there was a way around it.
I have a pretty annoying sleep disorder called delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), diagnosed by multiple clinicians. I have impeccable sleep hygiene, quit caffeine entirely, tried lots of OTC and prescription sleep drugs, light therapy, every kind of sleep supplement you've heard of and probably a few you haven't, and I still revert to going to bed around 5am and waking between noon and 1:30pm.
In the times I maintained a "normal" early-bird schedule, I actually consistently fall into a deep depression.
Our circadian rhythms are pretty powerful regulators -- not just of sleep, but of our hormones and regularity (in the poop sense) too. So misalignment wreaks havoc on our bodies in various ways, even if we're able to get enough sleep.
Anyway for some people they're more flexible and trainable than others. I'm genuinely happy for your case, but I mainly wanted to point out that not everyone will have the same results.
Out of curiosity, did you have any luck at all with the glasses-style light therapy devices like the Luminette? I was having limited success with other forms of light therapy (and the rest of the laundry list of interventions), and some recommendations from an experimental non24 protocol (https://circadiaware.github.io/VLiDACMel-entrainment-therapy...) lead me to finally try the glasses type and it's oddly effective, so far. I'm waking up around 10:30 AM without alarms and without sliding, which has... literally never happened before. I'm just hoping it won't regress to the mean after another month.
I've got n24, the glasses work temporarily for me but i cant see them as a long term solution as the entrainment doesnt last. Dedicating 3-4 hours first thing every morning to staring at a painful light while getting nothing else done (no driving, no computer, no active work or exercise, no going out in public) simply defeats the purpose.
ed: I should caveat that some people will no doubt be able to do some kind of productive activity while wearing them, I've not yet been able to.
> Anyway for some people they're more flexible and trainable than others. I'm genuinely happy for your case, but I mainly wanted to point out that not everyone will have the same results.
I wonder if this is something I unlocked during my digital nomad days. There was a period of 2 years in my mid 20’s when I moved from Europe to SFBA and back every 2 or 3 months. 9 hours difference each way, just enough to really screw up your rhythms.
This hasn't even the case for me. I have young children, so I can't sleep in anymore... I now wake up between 6am and 7am most days.
I still have trouble going to sleep early. I end up staying up too late, and then am tired most of the day the next day. But I still end up staying up too late the next night, too.
I would think I would adjust my schedule, but I struggle with it.
My biggest bedtime struggle is when I’m too tired to make the decision to stop what I’m doint and go to bed.
It takes some discipline but setting a sleep alarm has worked well for me.
10pm, watch goes bzzz -> lie down in bed with lights off. Even if you don’t feel like it, even if you don’t wanna sleep yet, even if it seems dumb. Invariably within 20min at most I’m asleep.
The hard part is accepting the boredom of it all. It’s sleep, you’re supposed to be bored.
Yeah, that is certainly part of it. Another part is that right after I get the kids to bed, I don’t want to do the dishes and clean up things to get ready for bed, so I take a break. But then I get more tired and want to clean up even less, so I stay up longer. Until I am so tired I sleep clean and go to bed.
If I had to guess, I would say you are not allocating enough personal time during your day so you are claiming it back in the night. And the lack of sleep is tomorrow’s problem.
Exactly. I feel for you. I am in the same boat. With young kids around I was forced to wake up 2 hours earlier than my circadian rhytm would dictate and it's been a nightmare so far.
I need to compensate each day with even more coffee than normally and my head's just spinning by the end of the day because I am too exhausted.
Since my rhytm cannot be forced to the early waking, on average I only sleep 5 hours each night.
May I suggest: avoid first-thing caffeine; wait until your body has naturally woken up to drink caffiene (or other stimulants). The natural process for waking up (cortisol!) stops when you feel awake. Using caffeine can hasten that moment, but then it doesn't get you any more awake than you would have gotten naturally, and can disrupt your sleep cycle in various ways (for me personally, early caffeine actually makes it harder for me to fall asleep at night; I always thought I was really sensitive to caffeine, but it turns out "...even if I have it first thing in the morning" was more accurately "...only if...").
Caffeine also takes 30-60 minutes to really kick in anyway, meaning your body has to do the waking up on its own either way. The immediate pick-me-up a regular drinker gets from it is a psychological response to the initial low concentration that can start to be felt after 10 or 15 minutes.
One thing that made a huge difference for me was managing light levels. My sleep schedule is much more tied to ambient light than I expected. Now I automatically dim the lights in the evening and bring them up in the morning. That leaves me with a solid 10-6-ish sleep schedule. No alarm clocks, no caffeine, and generally solid energy levels.
These days if I accidentally leave on some manual lights while I'm engaged in something I'll end up staying up way too late. Turns out I'm just not a responsible lightswitch user, so now I try to leave all up to Hue.
Humans have natural sleep preferences.[1] Artificial light can keep almost anyone up later though. Your story sounds like a life long early bird who stopped fighting their biology.
Yeah, these posts drive me nuts because they seem to imply that I should just "push myself and get over it".
No, sorry. I've been "fun-employed" for 3 years and I've experimented with my sleep schedule extensively. If someone wants to tell me they know my biology better than me, fine, but I'll do what keeps me productive and happy.
It’s better in that there’s more of it because I spend less time trying to work on personal projects when I’m already tired from dayjob and am more effective.
The actual sleep quality depends more on how much regular exercise I get and eating well than it does on timing. Unless I’m literally jetlagged.
I actually wondered if I was a night owl... or an even earlier riser. I never really tried it, but at around 5-7pm I'm always drowsy and that's the time of day I feel I could just easily fall asleep (no matter when I wake up).
So I always thought, maybe I need to wake up at 3am and fall asleep at 7pm.
i've gone to bed on maybe 5-10 occasions before my kids actually fall asleep. I read them nighttime books and get sleepy as fuck while reading. Then pop right over to bed around 8pm or 8:10pm and lay there falling asleep by 8:30pm. Usually wake up around 4-5am.
I'm not sure it would. There are other factors besides circadian rhythm at play for night workers.
Eg, they probably need money not, or they would be less likely to accept a night shift. Another one is how there is more noise during the day that could affect their sleep, etc...
Yeah, this just obviously correct. Sure, maybe there is some other biological factor that accounts for some of the increased rates of depression.
But it's an amazingly safe bet that the main factor is the part where we treat people poorly and openly classify them as a bad person. This seems pretty simple.
Until the had too much of an effect on my health I medicated myself into a morning person sleep schedule. I felt worse physically, just low key bad all the time, but I miss it so much. Getting treated that much better, with absolute benefit of the doubt given to me regarding everything I did, instead of the complete opposite, was really great.
I think everyone is somewhat affected the same way because of devices. The natural rhythm of humans is sunrise to sunset, without electricity. But we put ourselves in the pixel glow around the clock!
A more beneficial study than the OP would be to turn off all lights by sun down, and remove all technology. I’d wager folks would naturally wake up with sunrise over time and feel healthier, assuming they know what to do with themselves.
It’s only a burden if you pay any mind to the kind of fuckheads who would openly mock you for sleeping until your body indicates it has had enough sleep. People behaving that way is a good signal about them.
(I am non-24 and have been so my whole life. I have a 25-26h day and slowly drift out and back in to phase with the rest of the world on a few week period. I just woke up (19:00 local), for example.)
I sleep when I am tired, and I wake up when I am done sleeping. I dropped out of high school and have almost never kept a square job, but both of those things sucked when I tried them, so I was glad to be rid of an alarm clock.
Now my winter/pandemic home is in a city with more 24h restaurants and services than any other on the planet, as far as I can tell.
I have a regular workout schedule at the moment, but only when I wake up after 18:00 local, because cycling on the roads in CONUS when there are normal levels of traffic on them is approximately suicidal. I cover myself in EL wire and way too many flashing LEDs and go at like 03:00. I'm also a lights-off midnight console jockey and being outdoors in the mojave during daytime would cause me to immediately burst into flames.
Doesn't seem to have much effect on my sleep, but I also famously ingest way too much caffeine at all hours of the day.
TBH I prefer to be awake when everyone else is asleep. Crowds and lines and traffic are all pretty terrible, but so is living in low-population-density areas without easy access to goods and services. Being nocturnal in an urban environment is the only mitigation I know of. If I could be "cured" I wouldn't want to be.
I think the issue is more generally with being somehow "off" from most people's common schedule. I started waking early a few years ago (around 5 AM) so I could be able to exercise, shower, etc and be out the door at 7 AM in order to avoid rush hour.
This worked well mostly, especially since at the office my boss was OK with me arriving and leaving 1-1.5 hrs early.
This was great for going shopping, as shops here close fairly early (7:30 - 8 PM usually) and leaving work at 6:30-7 just doesn't leave enough time.
But then, that means everything shifts. I'd have to be in bed by 10 PM to not feel tired in the morning, which means having dinner around 7. Which means if I want to see friends or other people with "normal" schedules, I have to "stay out late" which messes with my rhythm.
As I'm not particularly social and don't go out too often, all in all this works out fine, and avoiding rush hour for the commute is absolutely worth it. But the point is this isn't "free".
Yes and this also goes the other way: I'm a "morning person" and have no problem with work schedules but have had to make sacrifices to my sleep and sanity for social obligations. I wouldn't switch roles to the opposite problem, but I've turned down social events my whole life due to not wanting to miss the sleep.
Ya, I have long gotten over feeling guilty for sleeping in. Whenever it comes up, I usually just ask how early they get up and say oh, that's great to get an early start like that. I was still working at that time too.
This is a great reason to be a founder. No-none gives me shit anymore for working funny hours because I’m on a roll. I’d rather be productive and weird, than half-baked and socially compliant. Plus, I get to make hiring decisions and keep the mediocrity police out.
I dont believe the whole "morning people" thing. You often hear "night owls" are usually more creative, intelligent, any old unique glorifications. Those are the benefits of social isolation.
Lack of sunlight and social isolation contribute to depression, and overall lack of energy.
Before the whole "I talk to plenty of people online"
Sure, but how could you possibly have time to visit productive friends. Or interact with the rest of society physically, getting up past 9 am.
Live with the sun, coming from a guy who used to wake up at 3pm.
The title is bullshit. They found that people who wake up earlier are less likely to be depressed. NOT that you can just wake up earlier and cure your depression.
"Genetically proxied earlier diurnal preference was associated with a 23% lower risk of depression"
> This means that if someone who regularly goes to bed at 1 a.m. instead goes to bed at midnight and sleeps for the same amount of time, they can reduce their risk by 23%...at 11 p.m...40%...early risers may benefit from waking up even earlier. For those in the moderate or evening ranges, however, shifting to an earlier bedtime would likely be helpful.
> “This study definitely shifts the weight of evidence toward supporting a causal effect of sleep timing on depression,” Daghlas added.
> Dr. Vetter gives the following recommendations to individuals who desire to go on an earlier sleep schedule...
They are explicitly recommending that people change their sleep schedule, even though the study did not explore changes in sleep schedule.
This bullshit shouldn't have been published in the first place.
So the article tries to separate this out by using Mendelian randomization which supposedly fixes this since whether or not you inherit a genetic variant from your parent is a coin toss. However it has to make some other assumptions that are pretty hard to justify when it comes to something as complex as sleep schedules. There are some strategies to at least detect when things go wrong, though.
Thanks for the comment. I came here to check if they'd got cause and effect backwards as usual - depression causes getting up late rather than up late causes depression. It surprises me people find this so hard - at uni even correlation was treated as major stuff and the idea of cause and effect almost beyond human knowledge.
I have a very acute sense of gloom and almost anxiety when I wake up late. Or even get out of bed late. For me personally this definitely accumulates into a sort of sense that I’m unhappy, not living well, and need a change. It correlated with more depressed times without questions. But is it the cause or a symptom?
My wife doesn’t really get it, and it bothers her quite a bit frankly. But I’ve come to crave waking up early, and doing so is almost like the first accomplishment of the day. Before cleaning my sleeping area, coffee, anything - I made the effort to respect my time and my day, setting myself up for success. I know I’ll sleep better that night, and give myself proper time to accommodate what I need to do that day. It feels right.
I do wonder sometimes though, where is the head and tail of it? Is it a purely psychological phenomenon or do I actually benefit from waking earlier, regardless of time spent asleep?
Is it a learned thing, or am I actually sensitive to my needs?
Sleep is a hard one to understand. All I know is I need a lot of it.
I hate waking up early, but feel exactly the same way: because waking up early is hard for me, if I do it, I feel like I've already accomplished something.
Conversely, if I wake up late, I feel like a failure.
This is kind of unfortunate, because I can wake up anytime I want and start work, I don't have to start working at any particular time. I also physically feel pretty shitty when I wake up early. But I can't just shake the feeling of being a failure when I wake up late.
I've always thought it to be purely psychological, but maybe that's not the case.
Sometimes waking and pushing myself into the day feels bad, but I rarely feel bad within 15 minutes of the initial dread of getting up. Is that the same for you, or do you mean it stays with you all day?
Maybe like an hour or two. I think I have some circadian rhythm disorder as my sleep schedule drifts later and later until I'm going to bed at 7am or so.
I recently had someone describe this feeling to me as "a deep sense of FOMO (fear of missing out)" and that definitely describes how I felt sometimes when oversleeping. Feels like you're missing out on the golden hour of the day that you'll never get back. It obviously makes no objective sense because late risers are awake roughly the same amount of time, but mornings just feel so much more important than late nights.
When staying up late I was basically just wasting time, but when I get up early it feels like I'm able to get a lot done in that extra time. I don't think that's actually true, I believe I could actually be more productive when often staying up late to grind programming for example, but it feels that way.
For me it's largely true because I have kids. If I wake before them, or even before my wife, that's time when I can focus on getting a single thing done efficiently. Once other people want me to do something, I'm pulled in 4 directions often with equal force.
I think in the past I squandered mornings more often, but now they're kind of like a sanctuary. I might read, lift weights, work on a project around the house - regardless of what I do though, I tend to do it well and with ease. It's often fairly focused and high quality time where I get to be a human being I can recognize and enjoy.
You live in a society that has some really strong stereotypes of early risers and night owls so there is a large amount of learned values involved here. There might be more to it than that for you, but the learned shame part is real and a very consistent part of our culture.
The only thing I can recall before external influences was waking up early as a child and playing in the grass and woods around my home, feeling like the days lasted forever. I associate waking early with those feelings, too.
Lack of sleep is a good short term treatment for depression. Lack of sleep can also trigger mania in those with a bipolar diagnosis. We also know that those with depression sleep more. So, I wouldn’t be so sure that it’s because you feel guilty about sleeping in. It probably has a deeper basis in biology.
> This means that if someone who regularly goes to bed at 1 a.m. instead goes to bed at midnight and sleeps for the same amount of time, they can reduce their risk by 23%; if they go to bed at 11 p.m., they can reduce their risk by roughly 40%. According to the research, people who are already early risers may benefit from waking up even earlier. For those in the moderate or evening ranges, however, shifting to an earlier bedtime would likely be helpful.
Except, correlation does not imply causality.
And some people are night owls by choice and can easily change their behavior to conform, and some people have fairly severe sleep disorders and really can't.
This is a bit like showing gay and trans people are often depressed, so if you just got them to stop they'd be happier.
Complete with a bunch of people in this comment thread who were bi in college and later settled down heteronormatively so clearly everyone else can, too (all the people who were nightowls when they were younger but easily moved their schedule).
This is interesting as I’ve noticed that when I sleep only 6-7 hours and leave my bed in the morning feeling tired because I could have slept more, I typically feel happier throughout the day than days when I sleep 8-9 hours and wake up naturally without an alarm.
I’ve suffered with depression on and off myself and I really think there is something to the article’s claims.
I just want to point out though, depression isn't about feeling happy or sad throughout the day. Depression is more of a long-term condition.
It's likely you have something interesting to do or something to keep you occupied in days you're waking up early. You might feel happy those days, but lack of sleep might actually be worsening your depression in the long run. Not saying this is what's happening necessarily, but it's possible.
That said, the article isn't even talking about sleeping less, it's talking about waking up early. But I remember seeing interesting studies that are actually studying the link between sleep deprivation and depression.
I don’t think the article is talking about sleeping for one hour less. It has examples saying “go to sleep one hour earlier; wake up one hour earlier” - so the same amount of sleep.
How this reconcile with the school that says people have a natural sleep pattern? For example I cannot fall asleep earlier than 2am. I was actually depressed because of everyone telling me I have to go to bed at 11pm or even earlier and that made me feel sad that I just couldn't. Only through a therapy I learned that it is perfectly okay to go to sleep at 2am. I also found out that in my case I only need 6 hours of sleep max. I was very sad that I almost never had the mythical 8 hours of sleep.
The abstract just says people genetically inclined to wake up early are less likely to have major depressive disorder.
The full text says their data are consistent recent randomized clinical trial that shifted the sleep timing of individuals with an evening diurnal preference.[1] But that study seems to be about making an unnatural schedule more bearable.[2] It should be compared to accommodating people's natural sleep cycles.
So isn't that a common sense? If you are inclined to wake up later than the society expects of you, then you are likely to be depressed because of the pressure?
> that shifted the sleep timing of individuals with an evening diurnal preference
> But that study seems to be about making an unnatural schedule more bearable.
That's sounds like something akin to telling a depressed person "why can't you just be happy?" and then making them watch comedy?
Best thing for me is to wake up early and then take a nice 2 pm nap for whatever hours extra sleep you feel you need. Much more refreshing than just sleeping late.
Don't you find it painful to wake up that way? Waking up without enough sleep feels terrible, even without ostensible bad effects on health and performance.
I recall there was another study that observed sleep deprivation being associated with alleviation of depression symptoms, so I wonder if the same psychobiological mechanism is at play here (if waking up early could be scientifically considered as a mild form of sleep deprivation). I also notice most of my peers working remotely and myself included tend to wake up later in the day and I wonder how much if any of the widespread miasma during lockdowns/mandated WFH period could be attributed to this phenomenon -- there are plenty of confounding factors but I think it would be worth investigating further.
> This means that if someone who regularly goes to bed at 1 a.m. instead goes to bed at midnight and sleeps for the same amount of time, they can reduce their risk by 23%
That's not what it means at all. It means that people with the genetics which causes them to naturally sleep earlier might also be genetically less at risk of depression.
You'd need to make an experiment where you take depressed people with genetics that causes them to naturally be night owls and force them to sleep earlier somehow (find a way where they can actually start to fall asleep sooner and all), and then measure the impact on depression to prove that it means what they claim it means, otherwise it is just correlation, not causation.
The paper cited a study. But it was small and seems to be about making an unnatural schedule more bearable.[1] It should be compared to accommodating people's natural sleep cycles.
And other studies found large sleep phase changes are very hard to maintain. A single late night or an illness can send someone back to their natural schedule.
For what it's worth, I shifted my sleep schedule via changes in sleep hygiene and lighting. My mood is way more even. If I mess up my sleep schedule, my mood tends darker. So as a former "natural" night owl, I think causation is plausible.
I used to be an extreme night owl when younger, I would commonly stay up until 8am playing video games and sleep until dusk. A few years ago I got into a fitness kick, and in addition to exercising to borderline excess and losing a lot of weight, I changed to an almost equally extreme morning person: waking up at 2-3am to exercise before starting my day and going to sleep at 6-7pm.
I can't say I would recommend either extreme, it's pretty ridiculous going to bed when it's broad daylight half of the year and waking up at such an ungodly hour. But I love mornings now, and it's so nice essentially being done with basically everything you have to do by noon, an extreme version of eating your frogs early.
I feel like I've lived a whole day by the time people roll out of bed, though of course that also means I'm sleeping like a small child when people are enjoying their evenings. Definitely not conducive to a healthy family life, but as a bachelor I'm enjoying it for now.
If I were to guess, the correlation to happiness (if any) has more to do with how the extra hour in the morning is used. It’s likely that people find themselves with an extra hour in the morning and do something more fulfilling than when it was at night. Whether it’s more personal time, a nicer breakfast, or even just taking more time to get ready with less anxiety of being late - all can be fulfilling in their own right. Whereas that same hour before bed all to often becomes mindless screen time.
Does anyone here have advice for how to get others to respect or just appreciate the different need for a change in sleep schedule? Like some others here, I've tried waking up early and I feel much better for it, but then my schedule becomes a inconvenience for others around me and that leads to it slipping or indirect sabotage of it.
Disappointed by the comments here. HN...pure clickbait...correlation != causation much? There was no study about waking up earlier, only showing a correlation between people who do wake up earlier and having less depression. I very much doubt forcing the depressed people to wake up an hour earlier and stop being night owls would help as all that stuff is probably genetic and also correlated to the genes contributing to depression.
This is as bad as "drink chamomile tea" and will be insensitively passed around from relatives to people with serious chronic behavioral health issues. However honestly the chamomile tea has more weight behind it than this.
I get up at 5AM, most days. On weekends, I let myself “sleep in,” to 5:30 or 6. Sometimes, I take short naps, during the day (“short” meaning that I lie in a recliner for an hour or so, and “nod off” for a couple of 15-20 minute snoozes).
That seems to work for me. Couldn’t do that, going into an office, so WFH FTW.
I often get more accomplished by 8AM, than I used to get done in half a day, at the office. I find that my bug-hunting is best done early.
Someone very close to me was dealing with pretty severe depression during their medical residency in a very intense program. They were having trouble finding the time to talk to someone about it let alone to go see a proper psychiatrist.
Finally they spoke to one of their preceptors. The advice? Double up your shifts for a week and grind yourself down until you absolutely are sleep deprived (they are all generally sleep deprived in this program, but have stretches of 3 or 4 days off). It seemed almost sadist to me, but they did it.
We were all surprised when it more or less worked. I would say it bought them a month here, a month there when needed. It seems like a terrible strategy over the long term but something was definitely going on. They called it a "big reset" and also insisted that they had an overall sense of euphoria for a week or so following each "dosing".
They don't do it anymore, after trying a few different medications a particular SSRI really seemed to click and it's been 20 years now without a major recurrence.
Although they do still work long hours, there is a now a law prohibiting residents from being worked over 80 hours per week. It's called the "Libby Zion Law." The law is in place because of a famous malpractice lawsuit due to a resident physician that administered pethidine when the patient was already on phenelzine, causing her to die. This caused a fatal drug interaction that the resident should have understood was deadly.
Yeah, this works great until ten years pass and you realize you've been killing yourself with work so much in order to stop thinking about the fact that you're fundamentally unhappy and need to change your outlook and approach to life.
Luckily I only did it for about 4 years before I snapped out of complete lack of appreciation from my employer and realized that if _I_ didn't take control of my life and demand appreciation, respect, and time off, that I was going to waste my entire adult life. Took my dad about 40 years to realize.
I mean, yeah, if you work 60 hours a week, commute 2 hours a day and drink 3 beers a night, you spend Saturday recovering, Sunday wishing you had energy for side projects and then Monday hits, cool, we didn't have to think about crushing depression. This is what happiness is, right fellow Americans?
Worth noting that "depressant" in the drug sense is anything which slows down the action of the central nervous system, it doesn't have anything to do with the mental state of depression.
Some of the drugs most known for bringing on a state of euphoria are depressants (eg; opiates).
Everyone has a manic/depressive cycle like in bipolar disorder (theirs is just more severe). You can manipulate it by messing with your sleep-- lack of sleep is one of the biggest triggers of a manic episode.
The mania triggered by this story should have been just as concerning as the depression.
I do this too but to scrape the bottom of the barrel on philosophy problems. It's basically like doing drugs.
> According to recent studies, obtaining more daylight during the day, as early risers do, triggers a chain reaction of hormonal changes that might affect mood.
I think this is the key is the daylight, not the regular amount of light, but the strong brightness in the early morning that trigger hormone affects not only our mood but our immune system as well.
Personally, I don't think it's related to a sleep schedule. it's more about the light. I've been recently listening to the Andrew Huberman podcast. He's a neuroscientist and has a weekly episode. And in one of his episodes, he mentioned that regular human being needs to be exposed to sunlight at least 30 mins a day. Not just a light, but the strong brightness coming from the sun which triggers hormones increase our alertness by raising the amount of cortisol in the body.
of course, this means more productivity, more immunity, and controls the mood. There's another way to do it, an ice bath for example but the light is actually more important than we think.
I don't think its necessarily the time of sleep that matters, but the consistent time of sleeping and waking up, including a long enough gap between (sleep hours). For me, that was what really helped.
Waking up early does boost confidence/ ego a bit though.
I think it’s just that most night owls have poor sleep hygiene. It’s Easy to stay up to midnight or 2 or sometimes 4 and sleep till whenever but that kind of shift is not good for you sleep quality
Descriptions because studying for me is a natural thing, every day we are given assignments if one day is not finished it will be an additional task the next day, it really irritates me sometimes every night while looking at the sky I want to scream as loud as I can so make my heart calm as soon as I fall asleep and tomorrow back to learn everything is just like it feels like I want to die but maybe I will change into valuable
The tl;dr from the paper’s abstract: “Morning diurnal preference is associated with reduced risk of major depressive disorder (MDD); however, causality in this association is uncertain.”.
So the article appears to be bullshit.
That said, if you suffer from depression, trying to alter your sleep pattern is a worthwhile experiment - there is a good chance it could work for you.
Yeah, from its URL the website already looks sketchy, "medi lifestyle news"? People need to learn to recognise content farms when they see them...
Googling the first paragraph points me to other farms, with this Yahoo News article maybe being the original source, although it's also sourced from some random Indian media site called ANI:
People with no mental illness get a good night's sleep, are more productive and therefore get up early in the morning.
People with Depression and/or Anxiety have trouble falling asleep and sleeping, so once they fall asleep late at night, they will wake up later in the morning after 4-5 hours of sleep.
I’m not sure I fully understood from the article, but it seems like they were using genetics as a proxy for “natural” wake-up time and something something causation for depression.
I didn’t really get it despite reading the explanation three times. I’m not convinced but that could just be down to this article rather than the paper itself.
I just don’t get how they accounted for something like “depression causes people to sleep later and for longer”.
This just confirms what I've been trying to tell my friends for years, which is that "when you sleep matters just as much as how long" but they always seem to roll their eyes. Though it seems pretty obvious that one feels more well rested going to bed at 10 and waking at 7 as opposed to going to bed at 5am and waking at 2pm
