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Late To Bed, Early To Die? Night Owls May Die Sooner (livescience.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Bad news for "night owls": Those who tend to stay up late and sleep in well past sunrise are at increased risk of early death, a new study from the United Kingdom suggests. The research, which involved nearly half a million people, found that self-described "evening people" were 10 percent more likely to die over a 6.5-year period, compared with self-described morning people. The findings add to a growing body of research that suggests that being a night owl could have negative effects on health. Many of these effects may be attributable to a misalignment between a person's internal clock, or circadian rhythm, and the socially imposed timing of work and other activities, the researchers said. "'Night owls' trying to live in a 'morning lark' world may have health consequences for their bodies," study co-author Kristen Knutson, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a statement.
I sleep like a lord.
If one sleeps past sunrise then dies then his death would be late rather than early :)
To even get out of bed in time we have to add unhealthy chemicals to our body that increase our blood pressure. Stop messing with the damn clock and let me come to work around 1pm and I'll be fine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember a time on the "old" Slashdot when articles like this never hit the front page. Thr article itself seems to give no indication that we are controlling for diet, excercise, other health factors. Just "welp people who are night owls are more likely to die". annecdotally, the times in my life when I was up until 4 AM and sleeping until 2-3 were certainly not the periods where I maintained my health responsibly.
Don't want to mess with my circadian rhythm, its the only rhythm I've got.
good riddance
There are any number of ways that you can die. You can die crossing the street so you can't live in fear of death. Wouldn't you rather lead a life that you enjoy versus trying to live for ever? We are only meant to spend a finite amount of time on this earth so you might as well do what you want, within reason. Articles like these remind me of the news filler stuff about coffee and chocolate. One day they're good for you, the next oh the horrors.
"'Night owls' trying to live in a 'morning lark' world may have health consequences for their bodies,"
Enough with the scientific babble doc. Give it to me in pain English.
The researchers found that the evening people were more likely than the early risers to have poor sleep quality and unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, sedentary lifestyles and eating late at night, Kim said. The night owls also tended to be younger, but were more likely to have high levels of body fat and triglycerides, or fats in their blood, than early risers. (Having high levels of fat is usually associated with older age.)
I wonder if any of these factors could attribute to a higher mortality rate? This study simply states that night owls have a higher rate of unhealthy lifestyle choices.
I would be more interested in the mortality rates of night owls who do not exhibit these behaviors. But then again there were only 95 night owls in this study, so I doubt you would be able to determine that from such a small sample size.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Why is the world designed for "morning larks?" We have telecommuting, electric light, etc -- not all jobs need to be done on 18th century farmers' hours. Is this just the human knack for self flagellation?
Worth it!
Assuming the study is valid, the real question is whether it's unhealthy to be a night owl, or that it's unhealthy to be a night owl with the structure of our society. Lefties live shorter lives too, not because there's anything inherently wrong with being a lefty, but because society is built around right-handed people.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Linked articles don't really have anything on things which might co-exist with staying up late. For instance, in mortality cases, did staying up late cause health issues leading to death, or was there a health issue which made it hard to sleep which also eventually caused death? Does stress affect sleep? Does staying up late correlate with lack of exercise? The list could go on and on. Without a mechanism, it's silly/stupid to suggest modifying things like the job market to fix the problem. It's comparable to saying "Cholesterol is bad, you should be really careful about eating eggs."
You read this and realize the bed of taking something that means that the current pressures of society are life threatening, that it's more responsible towards one's own safety and longevity to not live in accordance with society's rules. But twisted to avoid proper accountability.
Ministers will soon be announcing a "ground-breaking" late-to-bed tax to come into force in the UK. The new Tax will ensure everyone goes to bed before midnight in a bid to improve the heath of all UK citizens and boost the UK economy. Public Health England also hopes it will improve the health of children.
PUBLISH OR PERISH!
Rubbish smells better than death.
I was a night owl, and then my job started forcing me to do to 7 to 3. That means I'm often up at 5AM to comfortably get ready for work and have a non-shitty commute (ie 30 minutes, not 1.5 hours). I relented and started making a point of trying to be asleep by 9PM every night.
A lot of things mentally, emotionally and physically started bouncing back to normal. I had attributed a lot of it to caffeine, but it turned out that if I get 7+ hours of sleep on a forced early bird schedule, caffeine barely phases me in the mid afternoon. It really is that much about sleep schedule and length, nothing else.
It seems like the major factor impacting owl life is food supply and being hit by heavy equipment.
https://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/barn-owl-facts/barn-owl-life-expectancy/
I think the article implies that simply staying up late means you get less sleep and therefor are less healthy, but it could also be that people who prefer late to bed and late to rise tend to snack more at night and, in more general ways, have unhealthier lifestyles.
On the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly that night owls should be allowed to be at work later than their early bird counterparts. I'm good with working later, too.
Early to rise, early to bed
Makes a man poor, stupid and dead.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I worked rotating shifts for fifteen years. One location changed shifts every week, another changed monthly. It was terrible. There were times that I didn't know if it was six AM or six PM. I couldn't eat at night because my stomach wouldn't digest food at two AM and when I had breakfast at seven AM and went to bed I would experience GERD. Now my sleep times are mostly normal.
Picking up your nose leads to an early death from falling off a roof, a new study suggests.
I'm sure this is true. My normal sleeping time would be around 4am, but I have to get up around 6am. This means that I sleep way too little, much less than I should. I avoid driving a car, because I worry that I would fall a sleep driving (easy way to die), my immune system probably sleep-deprived also. Life is really shitty if you are not one of those who run the system.
Seriously. The incessant attempts of the Larks to demonstrate their superiority over the Owls is just tiring and stupid. I will continue to ignore them, in particular because there is nothing wrong with being an Owl and there is no way to change it anyways. Because one thing is for sure: A major reason for this difference is the fault of the Larks. They are forcing Owls to get up when they have not yet finished sleeping. It is really no surprise that impacts health.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The martian 25 hour day length should even things up a bit...
Night owls have to choose between getting up at 6am to get to work (fucking up their health due to lack of sleep if you don't self-medicate), or not getting a proper job (fucking up their health due to lack of affordable health care for poor people). No wonder their health is messed up in a world run by morning people.
I think worrying about what they're talking about this week that will kill you will probably kill you faster than not even taking that click-bait, and just living as pleasant a life as you can. GO OUTSIDE. That'll probably mitigate all this bullshit they keep trotting out in any event.
I'm under the impression that work schedules in a lot of places are much less larkish - work starts later and ends later than the typical American condition.
Welp, looks like there's effort to lay the scientific groundwork for a new victim class through sketchy "studies". Another bullshit excuse to upend social norms. You'da thought the negative repercussions from industrialization of societies would have taught us a lesson, but apparently not. Let's just upend the job market and disrupt society in order to cater to the needs of a tiny, tiny, minority based on bad science.
In addition to this, there seem to be no checks of the hypothesis either. If people with disrupted circadian rhythms are more likely to die then the life expectancy of frequent flyers who regularly have to deal with jet lag should similarly be impacted and yet they did not seem bothered to check that. This study seems to be a good example of cargo cult science.
The Early worm gets eaten by the bird.
Night owls might die sooner, but the make most of their life. The early birders get up early, show up for appointment on time and wait for the masters of the world, us, night owls, to show up late. They waste so much of their time, the extra years they live is probably not worth it.
An interesting story from Hindu scriptures. When a childless couple prayed to Lord Shiva, He gave them a choice, a dimwit who will live for 100 years, or a genius who will die in 16 years. The couple chose the short lived genius, thus was born Markandeyan. Makes you think about what is more important.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's the forcing of night owls into early morning schedules that's killing them. The assholes that say night owls are just being lazy for not aligning to morning hours. I have a suspicion that night owls tend to be more creative and disruptive. In response, there's a sociatal effort to stunt their growth and effect: Sleep deprivation. They start early in public schooling. Reprimand students for their biologically induced tardiness. The sleep deprivation affects studies, lowering grades, and again they're punished. By the time they exit schooling, they believe they're a lazy incompetent failure. Now, they accept that job at Subway making sandwiches without a fuss.
I am naturally a lifelong owl but have also been able to become an early morning person. But when I get upset or depressed from insufficient paid work as I am now I tend to stay up later, sometimes to 7 am then sleep, have ok dreams and not want to get up until later. I otherwise eat very healthy food and I don't do drugs or alcohol.
It's life circumstances and depression that may kill me, not my sleep hours.
I love "studies" that find a "link" between two things like this. Correlation is king!
Late to bed and early to rise.... Makes it hard to keep open your eyes!
Closed eyes lead to early death when driving, working, walking, running, and doing just about any daytime activity.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I've recently read studies that show that sleeping in bright (especially UV-lit) conditions harms sleep efficiency. I wonder how much of this test's variance would be explained by that? I have blackout curtains in my bedroom for a reason. (The Live Science article even eludes to this in the researchers' recommendation "that people make sure they're exposed to light early in the morning, but not at nighttime." No mention of whether this was controlled for in the study, but I doubt it.)
Another similar thought is that of consistent bed times, which are also shown to help sleep efficiency. Night owls are (perhaps) less likely to consistently go to bed at the same time every night while early risers (perhaps) go to sleep --and wake up-- at consistent times. These are guesses though.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Night Owl here and loving it. I have a 25.5 hour body clock .... if I stick to a regular job I'm fighting to get to bed, in fact before 1 AM is quite rare, even when I'm getting up at 6AM for work. It's the ONLY way to keep my body in a 24 hour clock cycle.
Now that I'm retired, I live the 25.5 life, and don't worry about it. Five to seven hours sleep and I'm up and feeling refreshed. It does mean that sometimes I'm sleeping in the afternoon after burning daylight, night light and morning light, but eventually I'll be back to waking early in the morning.
I don't mind, and I doubt that it will kill me earlier than I'm due, because it feels so right. But I might agree that if you have to force your sleep schedule, it might harm your health.
It's just evolution, baby.
Linked articles don't really have anything on things which might co-exist with staying up late. For instance, in mortality cases, did staying up late cause health issues leading to death, or was there a health issue which made it hard to sleep which also eventually caused death? Does stress affect sleep? Does staying up late correlate with lack of exercise? The list could go on and on. Without a mechanism, it's silly/stupid to suggest modifying things like the job market to fix the problem. It's comparable to saying "Cholesterol is bad, you should be really careful about eating eggs."
Bohemian types, like artists, musicians etc. seem to contradict these results. Just look at Keith Richards.
CAP: inhuman
Is it time to mention the obligatory xkcd comic for this topic?
https://xkcd.com/320/
The only danger to my health is being forced to be a morning person as a condition of continued employment. Used to work a graveyard shift from 10pm - 6am, was never tired. All I can do to stay awake during the day.
Night owls are more likely to drink coffee...and studies show that coffee drinkers live longer.
You joke, but the last study I saw referenced in the news (and didn't read) was about a year ago and concluded the exact opposite to this one. I wonder what the causes of death are and whether it's different based on population sizes (is one group more likely to be exposed to pollution, accidents, or sunlight than the other in a locale-dependent way, for example?)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Who's tired of younger people trying to make money from home instead of getting a 9-5 like everyone else. "Don't be a programmer M$ and Facebook have plenty of those for us..."
There's a lot of pressure in this world to be a "morning lark" as the summary states. But some people just can't do it due to their poor aerobic capacity. The solution is called a treadmill. Once their cardiovascular conditioning gets out of the terribly unhealthy range, they'll be getting up at 4am to makes sure they get to do their running before their kids wake up and then they'll be in the healthy group.
As a night owl forced to do work in the mornings, I can assure you sleeping against your circadian cycle is terrible for your health. There are tons of other studies you can look at and many of them focus on specific things, like the change of rates in a specific type of cancer. Many look at shift workers. A night owl working in the morning is one performing shift work.
Want to try it out? Take a month of vacation and go to bed 1-3 hours earlier and wake up 2-5 hours earlier every day from the previous day. Randomly select different durations to make it less likely your body will adjust to a schedule with a constant drift.
Disclaimer: Doing this has been shown to induce N24 in a few individuals. Do so at the risk of your easy life. And yes, your life is extremely easy compared to one with N24.
Appropriate Banksy quote: "People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine."
What were the causes of death for people who stay up late?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Not everyone has the same circadian rhythm. I work at night and sleep in the day. I have tried numerous times to work in the day and sleep at night, but my body always *naturally* slips back to the night schedule.
I feel more comfortable at night. It's dark, cool, quiet, peaceful, tranquil and nobody interrupts me while I'm working.
If one sleeps past sunrise then dies then his death would be late rather than early :)
Unless he died in his sleep. B-)
I run on "substandard time" and always intended to be late to my funeral.
(So I joined a cryonics organization. That way I get to compound the pun by making it literal.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't see any mention of seeing if this early night owl death effect is exactly because the entire social and work structure is set up to be detrimental to night owls ?
Surely night owls have additional stress because work timings in general are completely ill-suited to the night own circadian rhythm.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Early to bed, early to rise,
makes you healthy wealhty and wise.
But early to bed, early to rise,
while your date meet with other guys.
It seems to me that a more likely cause then messed up circadian rhythm would be that "night owls' " activities during those hours probably contribute the their early deaths and morning people's activities in the early morning contribute to their longevity. It is no surprise that late at night many people are more likely to be drinking or doing drugs. And in the early morning many people are likely to be exercising. So the early risers not only are not harming their bodies with excessive alcohol, drugs use, and risky sexual behavior, they are likely befitting their bodies with regular exercise.
Vitamin D protects against cancer, and you make it by getting sunlight on your skin. The dirty secret about tanning beds is that they do increase the risk of melanoma very slightly, but they decrease the incidence of all other cancers by a factor of about 30 in dark climates. It's no wonder that Obamacare's first tax was against tanning beds - Medicare is too damn expensive.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I attribute being an owl to a tendency of not wanting to change state until it gets really uncomfortable.
If I'm focused working, I want to continue working. If I'm up late in the evening I want to stay up. And when I'm in bed, I want to stay there. Hence everything tends to shift back timewise as far as socially acceptable. Not needing more than 6h of good sleep helps.
Larks probably enjoy changing state more and may have a shorter attention span. So they tend to get out of bed earlier, stop working earlier and go to bed earlier, but tend to have a net longer sleep and are less hours awake per day. Their life may be longer, but more of it is spent sleeping.
That's what they're saying.
There are three kinds of people. One, the morning larks, who get up early, have a fine day, get along with others, and don't mind what others do.
Then there are the fundamentalist evangelical morning larks, who think they are better than others, are sure that their Morning Lark way of life is perfect and good and proper, and believe everyone else must be beaten into compliance.
Then of course the night owls, who do fine sticking whatever schedule works for them, but have to put up with the fundamentalist larks.
Ah, but there's also a fourth type of person - those who stay up so late passionately working on creative projects, until sunrise, they're actually very early for the next day!
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early to rise and early to bed, makes a man healthy, but socially dead ...
i go to bed late, but get up real early.
so that evens out!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
It couldn't possibly be that people who live unhealthy lifestyles tend to stay up later and skew the results, could it?
It doesn't sound like the study ruled out other factors. So, all they've managed to do is demonstrate correlation. They have not proven that staying up late, in and of itself, causes reduced lifespans.
If anything, research has shown the opposite to be true: that people shouldn't mess with their internal clocks. So, if your clock is set later than others, you should listen to it and stay up later.
Get up early, another article said to drink a lot less. About a drink a day cutting men down from 2 drinks a day.
I bet coffee will be next and we already know how terrible sodas, chocolate, well anything tasty is.
Eat right, get up when they say, exercise, you'll still die.
It should be obvious to any half-brained human that there are quite a few more factors that the hours when you sleep.
There was another study that showed it is best to sleep when you are tired. i.e. following your own body's rhythm.
Adequate rest WHEN you need it does NOT care when you take it. Period.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
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if i read what it says it actually says society kills night owls by trying to force them into the hour of rising chickens ... not they kill themselves by staying up late ... well thats what it says to me and i wonder, that's 'evening people', right?
so if i get up at midnight and stay up till noon where my evening starts and get to bed by three or four pm til midnight ... what does that make me ?
... who can i sue for trying to kill me early ?
same to blame : society will try to force me so i'm gonna make like pilate here and wash my hands of it
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?