Early to bed, early to rise
Keeping a consistent sleep schedule could hold major benefits for your health, research suggests.
Before now, sleep advice has tended focused on getting enough sleep, rather than when you should get it. But an analysis of data from more than 72,000 people shows your sleeping pattern may be even more important than sleep duration.
Going to bed and getting up at irregular times raises the risk of heart disease, heart failure and stroke by 26%, according to research published in the Journal of Community and Epidemiology.
Scientists combed through data from the U.K. Biobank to figure our how our sleep schedule might impact our health. They looked at activity tracking data over eight years from 72,269 adults aged 40 to 79, giving each a “sleep regularity index” scored on sleep times, wake times and waking up in the night.
Those who kept the least consist sleep schedule were more than a quarter more likely to experience a serious adverse cardiovascular event than people with a “normal” routine.
Those with “moderately” irregular sleep habits were 8% more likely to face the same serious events.
What Sleep Schedule Is Best For Health?
It’s still true that most adults should aim for between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. But duration alone isn’t enough to stave off the risks of an irregular schedule, the researchers found.
People who stuck to roughly the same schedule most nights a week had the lowest risks of major cardiovascular events.
Consistency Is Key
The study didn’t determine exactly how close to your ideal sleep and wake times was enough to avoid extra cardiovascular risk. But the farther a person strays from this schedule, the greater the risk.
“We should aim to wake up and go to sleep within 30 minutes of the same time each night and each morning, including weekends,” lead author Jean-Philippe Chaput of the University of Ottawa told The Guardian. “Within an hour of the same time is good but less good than 30 minutes, and even better is to have zero variation.
“Beyond an hour’s difference each night and each morning means irregular sleep. That can have negative health impacts. The closer you are to zero variation the better.”
The Odd Exception ‘Won’t Kill You’
Of course, nobody is perfect, Chaput said, and sleeping outside your schedule one or to days a week is “not going to kill you.”
But regularly going to bed at different times — say five or six days a week — becomes a chronic issue. “That is a problem,” he said.
Waking Up At The Same Time Is Important
If you want to catch up on lost hours, its better to go to bed earlier than wake up late, Chaput said.
“Waking up at different times each morning really messes with your internal clock, and that can have adverse health consequences,” he said, adding that it’s best to keep the same hours at the weekend as you would the rest of the week.
How Does Your Sleep Schedule Affect Your Health?
The study was observational, which means that it can’t prove why something happened. It can only establish associations like risk.
Other research has found a link between poor sleep and a physiological marker of inflammation, as British Heart Foundation senior cardiac nurse Emily McGrath, who was not involved in the study, explained.
“It is not clear exactly how sleep benefits the heart but research suggests that disturbed sleep is associated with higher levels of a protein called CRP,” she told the Daily Star.
“This is a sign of inflammation, the process linked with heart and circulatory disease,” she said, adding: “sleep can also have an indirect impact on heart health, by affecting our lifestyle choices.”
Poor sleep may make it harder to exercise and leave you with less time to cook healthy meals, for example. It can also make it harder to concentrate and leave you feeling fatigued.
