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Late To Bed, Early To Die? Night Owls May Die Sooner (livescience.com)

Posted by msmash on from the psa dept.

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.

3 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. No wonder by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re: No wonder by shaitand · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "To even get out of bed in time we have to add unhealthy chemicals to our body that increase our blood pressure."

      Both caffeine and cocaine are potentially unhealthy chemicals people are taking to manage the sleep patterns that arise from night owls having to adapt to a world which has a schedule catered to day larks as an artifact of having once been centered around natural lighting and agriculture.

      Today we are familiar with cocaine as an ultra pure extract of insane concentration being used by drug addicts, when it was outlawed it was generally a very dilute tea made from leaves with similar properties to caffeine and milder side effects. It was outlawed because the tea and coffee industries had a better lobby. The highly concentrated stuff mostly came about because it is smaller and easier to smuggle that way. If you treated caffeine the way we've come to treat cocaine it wouldn't be highly addictive only because you'd be dead. Nobody researches positive health effects of cocaine but it shares many of the same mechanisms believed to be responsible for the positive effects of caffeine. It may be trivia but it is worth challenging societal and preconceived notions now and then. In countries where they grow naturally it is quite common for workers to chew coca leaves in a use similar to our drinking of coffee or British drinking of tea.

  2. Re: Correlation =\= Causation by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The biggest problem "night owls" have is living in a society that forces them to live in a state of life-long sleep-deprivation if they have any kind of normal job.

    I just don't get tired naturally until 2 or 3am. I can fall asleep earlier if I'm sleep-deprived, but THEN my body treats it like an afternoon nap... I'll wake up 3-5 hours later, then be unable to fall asleep again until dawn. My earliest sustainable go-to-bed time is ~12:30am (with Ambien & melatonin).

    I worked happily for years at a company that let me work 11-7 (usually a little later, but I didn't mind). I rarely got sick & did the best work in my life. Sadly, the company didn't survive The Great Recession.

    I later worked for 2 months at a job that required me to get up at 6:30am... it damn near killed me. I was getting sick enough to need antibiotics every 2-3 weeks (mostly strep & sinus infections), crashed & burned into Friday night, and didn't start to feel "not awful" until Sunday... and then the hell began started again. My short-term memory went down the toilet & took months to heal after I quit.

    By week 4 of my hellish early-morning job, I was having worse & worse muscle cramps... first, randomly at night. Then, sitting at my desk. Then at completely random moments, including driving or just walking. I'm convinced I was weeks away from having a heart attack that would basically have been just another muscle cramp, and probably would have literally died if I'd kept it up.