![]() ![]() The study used sleep data gathered from wrist activity monitors worn by more than 85,000 participants of the UK Biobank Study, which houses in-depth genetic and health information on more than a half a million Brits. Sleep hygiene: 8 ways to train your brain for better sleepīut it’s a bummer if you’re a night owl, primed to perform better in the afternoon and evening and stay up late, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. And even if you are not a shift worker, but have even a couple of hours of flip-flopping back and forth between your weekday sleep schedule and your weekend schedule, you are at greater risk for weight gain, obesity, diabetes, and depression.There are ways to train your brain for better sleep. Even scarier is that shift work is the only non-chemical item on the American Cancer Society’s carcinogens list, meaning doctors agree that shift work increases a person’s risk for cancer. It’s no wonder shift workers, who have an even more extreme version of circadian misalignment, have greater health problems like obesity than their non-shift working peers. ![]() But imagine if that big clock tower’s time would just randomly change, and nobody could be confident that they knew what time it was. When the big clock tower’s time always matches the train conductors’ times, which also matches all the computers’ times and each passenger’s watch, then things go smoothly. If your body and brain are Grand Central Station, then the circadian system is the network of all the clocks at the station. This is no small deal, because the circadian system is responsible for keeping all of your biological functions on schedule and running smoothly, including your metabolism, hormone secretion, cognitive function, muscle tone, and even mood. Unfortunately, these habits constantly mess up your inner biological clock, called the circadian system. Have you ever worn sunglasses in the morning because you’re just not ready to look human yet? These habits are totally understandable-I used to do all of them. ![]() You try to go to bed “at a decent hour,” but cannot help tossing and turning and eventually getting on your iPad late at night. For example, if you’re a delayed chronotype person, I bet you sleep in on weekends. It’s because we are forced to live a life of misalignment-our biology does not match up with our external demands, and this causes us to have less healthy habits for maintaining our biological clocks. But this is not because owls are inherently unhealthy. People with delayed chronotypes (i.e., night owls) are at greater risk for psychiatric disorders, addiction, hypertension, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and even infertility. Night Owl Coping Mechanisms and HealthĪnd it's not only a problem of bad reputation. ![]() When he said, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he didn’t follow that up with the caveat that this is only true for morning people! If he were speaking to the rest of us, he should have said, “Staying up, sleeping in, makes you healthy and happy in your own skin.” But unfortunately, his admiration for morningness has contributed to the stereotype that late risers are just lazy or immature. But the further I get into my professional career, the more my biology has to cater to the big bad world, which is designed by and for morning people. meetings, so my body and brain could happily live on the schedule they wanted to. And there was no problem with that in college! I had no 7:00 a.m. partying-I mean, studying-without my energy flagging. and I could comfortably stay up past 2:00 a.m. Back in college, I never signed up for classes starting before 10:00 a.m. That is, we could be extreme morning larks or night owls. But many of us have more obviously advanced or delayed chronotypes. for a run, but you’re not the type to be buzzing with energy after midnight either. Most of you are somewhere in the middle-you don’t love waking up at 5:00 a.m. Your answers will depend on your chronotype, a biologically hardwired tendency for your body and brain to function best at certain times of day. Would you rather watch a sunrise, or count the midnight stars? Do you have your creative energy and optimistic zeal when you pop out of bed in the morning, or when everyone else has gone to bed for the night? Or how about this-if you had to wake up at 6:00am, would you look and feel more like Mary Poppins or Oscar the Grouch? ![]()
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