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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.
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.
Fuck... shit.... it's fuck'n 2:48am...
FUUUUUCK
going to BED NOW!!!
see you all tomorrow
FUUUUCK!!!!!
Never happened. True story.
Don't want to mess with my circadian rhythm, its the only rhythm I've got.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Such an excellent example of what GP wrote about.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes