9 ms·

Late to Bed, Early to Die? Night Owls May Die Sooner

chmaynard 9y ago
Maybe, but odds are that they will have more fun and die happier than us early birds. (No, I didn't read the article. :)
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Or even, more waking hours total over their shorter span of years?
hn0 9y ago
tldr; Night Owls May Die Sooner * (* when living in a morning person world)
- brandnewlow 9y ago
  That which differs from the norm must be destroyed!
- frockington 9y ago
  The Obese May Die Sooner * (* when living in a skinny persons world) It seems like the article was saying that a morning persons world is naturally healthier, not that morning people are somehow afflicting non-morning people
  - lowbloodsugar 9y ago
    It said the exact opposite: "The researchers said society needs to recognize that making night owls start work early may not be good for their health."
nomy99 9y ago
interesting, maybe humans have a fixed bandwidth on "awake hours", and night owls just burn through the stock quicker...
- gnode 9y ago
  Studies have shown sleeping for longer also correlates with increased mortality. Although I've not seen a study which establishes the causality of this. It's plausible that people who are sleeping longer are doing it because (potentially undiagnosed) diseases are making them lethargic, rather than oversleeping causing disease. I think a study would have to take a set of people and force sleeping habits upon them for a significant length of time for the results to be meaningful with regards to causality.
  - tomxor 9y ago
    > It's plausible that people who are sleeping longer are doing it because (potentially undiagnosed) diseases are making them lethargic That was the main theory behind that correlation, it makes sense since healthy people will naturally find it quite difficult to sleep longer than 8 hours (of actual uninterrupted sleep). Some people will also sleep longer because of issues affecting their quality of sleep (health or otherwise)
    - nomy99 9y ago
      There need not be a physical cause for excess sleep. Emotional disturbances or drug use can also lead to mini escapades to the bedroom. This can cause your body to adapt to a longer sleeping pattern; bypassing the pain of sleep fatigue healthy people have.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - truculation 9y ago
        That certainly seems to be the story with me -- not drugs, per se, but general greediness and over-stimulation puts me on a ~24.5 hour cycle. When the mind is making a lot of noise it's harder to get to sleep and it takes more sleep to recover. That said, I suspect there's no fundamental reason why a night owl can't become a morning lark if he sincerely wants to.
sv12l 9y ago
Yet, nowhere in the article did they mention what time is their half-a-million represents for a night owl, 11PM, 12AM, 1AM?
- cptskippy 9y ago
  There was a lot of curious phrasing in the article and is very unclear. It starts off with the line "those who tend to stay up late and sleep in well past sunrise are at increased risk of early death". But then goes on to talk about the health consequences of Night Hawks trying to live as Morning Larks. So the article is saying don't sleep in or you'll die young but if you get up early your health will suffer adversely?
- TetOn 9y ago
  Also seems to hinge on whether the participants "consider themselves" to be a night-owl. If the effect is there, you should be able to stratify by, say, regularly going to bed after 1am (or whatever). This doesn't seem to be that.
  - brlewis 9y ago
    Exactly. I think people categorize themselves relative to those around them. At the beginning of the study period, participants were asked whether they considered themselves to be morning people or evening people, or whether they felt they fell somewhere in between those two groups.
Puer 9y ago
I'm a primary insomniac, but I also have delayed sleep phase disorder so my natural circadian rhythm is offset by a few hours. Regardless of light exposure and regular routines I'll often find myself hitting peak sleepiness in the late afternoon and then the early morning. Unfortunately, this isn't exactly compatible with society's expectations of when I should be up and about. I find it interesting (though I'm not surprised) that the article seems to imply that even those who get enough sleep, just on an offset schedule, still have greater rates of mortality. Sleeping disorders are often associated with other significant issues in their own right so there's definitely a degree of variable confounding.
- tomxor 9y ago
  > I find it interesting (though I'm not surprised) that the article seems to imply that even those who get enough sleep, just on an offset schedule, still have greater rates of mortality. They seemed to be suggesting that the offset is not a risk factor in itself, more that it's incompatibility with society imposes external stresses that contribute to increase chance of mortality. If that's true it no doubt varies greatly between individuals, their profession, lifestyle and other general interaction with the outside world - which all themselves will of course contribute to different chances of mortality and health. Full Disclosure: My morning is most peoples lunchtime. I get plenty of sleep and am usually very well rested, but waking up out of sync can be quite irritating and inconvenient once I am actually awake. Not to mention the feeling of being "the lazy one" in spite of being quite a workaholic most of the time.
jacquesm 9y ago
By that reckoning I should have been long dead. Of course this is 'statistics' and I'm just one individual but I do believe there are compensating factors. If you're a night owl but you otherwise live a healthy life you could very well outlive your early rising, smoking, hard-drinking cousin. These overly simplistic conclusions from single cause to effect add up to unrealistic expectations of what living like a saint could achieve. So far nobody seems to have been able to beat 135 or so, and even that must be the best way to spend a large chunk of your life terribly bored. Playgrounds, home improvement, participating in traffic, working late -> reduced life expectancy. So, the best way to live a really long life is to be an early riser and to never leave your house.
- codingdave 9y ago
  I didn't read it as a direct cause and effect, as they were talking about a 10% increased chance of early death due to forcing their natural circadian rhythm to match everyone else. And they even recommended letting night owls have different schedules at work as one possible solution.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > I didn't read it as a direct cause and effect, as they were talking about a 10% increased chance of early death due to forcing their natural circadian rhythm to match everyone else. Yes, that and about 100 or so factors the study did not control for. I really have had quite enough of all these studies that indicate substantial effects on your lifespan depending on some minor detail in your life and then some marginally significant result. That and that for every study like that you can probably find a counterpart. Ditto heart disease and cancer.
StaticRedux 9y ago
#MorningPeopleAreSmug
bunderbunder 9y ago
Evening people were at greater risk for certain health conditions, including diabetes, psychological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, neurological disorders and respiratory conditions, the study found. But even after accounting for these conditions, the study still found that evening people had a slightly higher risk of dying during the study period, compared with morning people. Translation: There's probably some more confounding variables they haven't found yet.
- subcosmos 9y ago
  All of those illnesses are tied with circadian desynchrony problems. If you screw with the clock gene in a mouse for example, or poke at the part of the hypothalamus that controls sleep-wake cycles (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), those mice will die early of heart disease and cancer. Fun fact: one of the top genes associated with type-2 diabetes, for example, is the melatonin receptor! These are hardly confounds, but more end-points of diseases of aging, which can be accelerated when the bodies homeostatic control of anabolism and catabolism is broken. In short, there is much that remains to be done to find the associations between sleep architecture, aging, and human health outcomes. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275.6.h2334 https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275... https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    Likely a circular effect. All of those things can be disruptive to sleep.
  - jwilliams 9y ago
    All true and good stuff -- But I think the OP is pointing out that being a Night Owl is probably confounded (majorly) with a significant range of other health and lifestyle factors. This is always a major challenge in these types of studies. It's useful research - but it often ends up as a news headline "doing X is a factor in Death." Which is often misleading.
  - 9y ago
smoyer 9y ago
It's interesting to me that the ascribed the increase in mortality for night-owls to the fact that their schedule doesn't mesh with societies expectations - I suspect they'll also find that it's not good to have a sleep cycle that's too out-of-sync with the daylight hours (we already know a lack of sunlight during the winter hours affects some people and we use apps like F.Lux to dim our screens to avoid tricking our minds with extra daylight frequencies).
teawrecks 9y ago
I remember seeing this same conclusion from a study over 5 years ago. That one also mistook correlation for causation.
pradn 9y ago
There are a thousand of these health/nutrition articles every year, all telling you that this or that has a small effect on your health and life. Given how hard it is to reproduce these studies and how minimal the effects are, I find it hard to care.
- cgh 9y ago
  They are epidemiological and their goal isn't to really prove anything but to generate new hypotheses and provide hints for directions of research based on the correlations found. Unfortunately, the popular press doesn't tend to distinguish between epidemiology and more rigorous double-blind studies.
limeblack 9y ago
As someone who has worked nightshift, I have heard it can cause cancer. It doesn't look good for us. [1]: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312064.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312064.php
- baccheion 9y ago
  Is it due to not getting enough sunlight (vitamin D)?
aje403 9y ago
“For example, some studies have shown that evening people are less likely to eat a healthy diet and more likely to use substances such as alcohol and illegal drugs, compared with morning people.” Where can I acquire research funding? I have groundbreaking hypotheses I would like to test such as “people who smile more are happier” or “people who have high net worth are more likely to purchase expensive watches”. I am highly qualified to pursue this research - I have a solid foundation in high school statistics and took a freshman sociology course.
- ivraatiems 9y ago
  What common sense would suggest is true very often doesn't align with what research has found to actually be true. Don't take the world for granted. Don't assume you understand something just because the answer seems obvious. In fact, the example you gave - people who smile more are happier - is true, but the cause is possibly the opposite of what the sentence implies. Some people are happy more because they force themselves to smile; they're not smiling because they're happy.[1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-make-you-happier/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-ma...
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    On the other hand, throwing enough p = .05 studies at the world lets you 'learn' all sorts of unintuitive - and untrue - things. That smiling/happiness result, for example, looks to be another casualty of the replication crisis. [1] Could it be true? Maybe, but at the quality of existing research it's not clear studying it was an improvement on intuition. Checking our instincts with data is a good thing to do, but it's hardly a silver bullet when searching for the truth. [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/08/can_smiling_make_you_happier_maybe_maybe_not_we_have_no_idea.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
    - imh 9y ago
      Those are two entirely separate questions. Poorly designed studies vs the studies's subject matter.
didibus 9y ago
If you have a fringe behaviour on any dimensions, where you are unlike the average, there are only two possibilities, you've evolved a superior trait, or you've evolved an inferior trait. I feel evolutionary wise, chances are higher that you've evolved an inferior trait. I am offset in my sleep, 3am to noon, and I need a minimum of 9hours to feel rested, 10hour of sleep is ideal. Now to be honest, this doesn't sound like the recipe to a superior trait, so I'm not too surprised if it ended up costing me something like additional health issues later in life. Sadly :(
m3kw9 9y ago
Seem like a narrow minded study that found a consistent variable coincidentally and pointing it out as the cause
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
"The researchers said society needs to recognize that making night owls start work early may not be good for their health." It's not that being a night owl means you are going to die sooner, it's that a society run by morning larks is detrimental to night owl health.
baccheion 9y ago
Adrenal burnout is associated with rising energy levels as the day progresses (ie, one way to create a night owl) and a constant stress state. NutrEval (include hormone panel) catches many imbalances/deficiencies. It can almost be assumed vitamin D (+ K), vitamin E, and magnesium are low. Vitamin D (+ K) strongly affects the pineal gland and melatonin release. Resveratrol in the morning resets circadian rhythm, as does melatonin at night. If fixing deficiencies/imbalances does not "normalize" circadian rhythm, then that's the natural rhythm and is something to work around.

Maybe, but odds are that they will have more fun and die happier than us early birds. (No, I didn't read the article. :)

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Or even, more waking hours total over their shorter span of years?

hn0 9y ago

tldr; Night Owls May Die Sooner * (* when living in a morning person world)

brandnewlow 9y ago
That which differs from the norm must be destroyed!
frockington 9y ago
The Obese May Die Sooner * (* when living in a skinny persons world) It seems like the article was saying that a morning persons world is naturally healthier, not that morning people are somehow afflicting non-morning people
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  It said the exact opposite: "The researchers said society needs to recognize that making night owls start work early may not be good for their health."

nomy99 9y ago

interesting, maybe humans have a fixed bandwidth on "awake hours", and night owls just burn through the stock quicker...

gnode 9y ago
Studies have shown sleeping for longer also correlates with increased mortality. Although I've not seen a study which establishes the causality of this. It's plausible that people who are sleeping longer are doing it because (potentially undiagnosed) diseases are making them lethargic, rather than oversleeping causing disease. I think a study would have to take a set of people and force sleeping habits upon them for a significant length of time for the results to be meaningful with regards to causality.
- tomxor 9y ago
  > It's plausible that people who are sleeping longer are doing it because (potentially undiagnosed) diseases are making them lethargic That was the main theory behind that correlation, it makes sense since healthy people will naturally find it quite difficult to sleep longer than 8 hours (of actual uninterrupted sleep). Some people will also sleep longer because of issues affecting their quality of sleep (health or otherwise)
  - nomy99 9y ago
    There need not be a physical cause for excess sleep. Emotional disturbances or drug use can also lead to mini escapades to the bedroom. This can cause your body to adapt to a longer sleeping pattern; bypassing the pain of sleep fatigue healthy people have.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - truculation 9y ago
      That certainly seems to be the story with me -- not drugs, per se, but general greediness and over-stimulation puts me on a ~24.5 hour cycle. When the mind is making a lot of noise it's harder to get to sleep and it takes more sleep to recover. That said, I suspect there's no fundamental reason why a night owl can't become a morning lark if he sincerely wants to.

sv12l 9y ago

Yet, nowhere in the article did they mention what time is their half-a-million represents for a night owl, 11PM, 12AM, 1AM?

cptskippy 9y ago
There was a lot of curious phrasing in the article and is very unclear. It starts off with the line "those who tend to stay up late and sleep in well past sunrise are at increased risk of early death". But then goes on to talk about the health consequences of Night Hawks trying to live as Morning Larks. So the article is saying don't sleep in or you'll die young but if you get up early your health will suffer adversely?
TetOn 9y ago
Also seems to hinge on whether the participants "consider themselves" to be a night-owl. If the effect is there, you should be able to stratify by, say, regularly going to bed after 1am (or whatever). This doesn't seem to be that.
- brlewis 9y ago
  Exactly. I think people categorize themselves relative to those around them. At the beginning of the study period, participants were asked whether they considered themselves to be morning people or evening people, or whether they felt they fell somewhere in between those two groups.

Puer 9y ago

I'm a primary insomniac, but I also have delayed sleep phase disorder so my natural circadian rhythm is offset by a few hours. Regardless of light exposure and regular routines I'll often find myself hitting peak sleepiness in the late afternoon and then the early morning. Unfortunately, this isn't exactly compatible with society's expectations of when I should be up and about. I find it interesting (though I'm not surprised) that the article seems to imply that even those who get enough sleep, just on an offset schedule, still have greater rates of mortality. Sleeping disorders are often associated with other significant issues in their own right so there's definitely a degree of variable confounding.

tomxor 9y ago
> I find it interesting (though I'm not surprised) that the article seems to imply that even those who get enough sleep, just on an offset schedule, still have greater rates of mortality. They seemed to be suggesting that the offset is not a risk factor in itself, more that it's incompatibility with society imposes external stresses that contribute to increase chance of mortality. If that's true it no doubt varies greatly between individuals, their profession, lifestyle and other general interaction with the outside world - which all themselves will of course contribute to different chances of mortality and health. Full Disclosure: My morning is most peoples lunchtime. I get plenty of sleep and am usually very well rested, but waking up out of sync can be quite irritating and inconvenient once I am actually awake. Not to mention the feeling of being "the lazy one" in spite of being quite a workaholic most of the time.

jacquesm 9y ago

By that reckoning I should have been long dead. Of course this is 'statistics' and I'm just one individual but I do believe there are compensating factors. If you're a night owl but you otherwise live a healthy life you could very well outlive your early rising, smoking, hard-drinking cousin. These overly simplistic conclusions from single cause to effect add up to unrealistic expectations of what living like a saint could achieve. So far nobody seems to have been able to beat 135 or so, and even that must be the best way to spend a large chunk of your life terribly bored. Playgrounds, home improvement, participating in traffic, working late -> reduced life expectancy. So, the best way to live a really long life is to be an early riser and to never leave your house.

codingdave 9y ago
I didn't read it as a direct cause and effect, as they were talking about a 10% increased chance of early death due to forcing their natural circadian rhythm to match everyone else. And they even recommended letting night owls have different schedules at work as one possible solution.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > I didn't read it as a direct cause and effect, as they were talking about a 10% increased chance of early death due to forcing their natural circadian rhythm to match everyone else. Yes, that and about 100 or so factors the study did not control for. I really have had quite enough of all these studies that indicate substantial effects on your lifespan depending on some minor detail in your life and then some marginally significant result. That and that for every study like that you can probably find a counterpart. Ditto heart disease and cancer.

StaticRedux 9y ago

#MorningPeopleAreSmug

bunderbunder 9y ago

Evening people were at greater risk for certain health conditions, including diabetes, psychological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, neurological disorders and respiratory conditions, the study found. But even after accounting for these conditions, the study still found that evening people had a slightly higher risk of dying during the study period, compared with morning people. Translation: There's probably some more confounding variables they haven't found yet.

subcosmos 9y ago
All of those illnesses are tied with circadian desynchrony problems. If you screw with the clock gene in a mouse for example, or poke at the part of the hypothalamus that controls sleep-wake cycles (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), those mice will die early of heart disease and cancer. Fun fact: one of the top genes associated with type-2 diabetes, for example, is the melatonin receptor! These are hardly confounds, but more end-points of diseases of aging, which can be accelerated when the bodies homeostatic control of anabolism and catabolism is broken. In short, there is much that remains to be done to find the associations between sleep architecture, aging, and human health outcomes. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275.6.h2334 https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275... https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Likely a circular effect. All of those things can be disruptive to sleep.
- jwilliams 9y ago
  All true and good stuff -- But I think the OP is pointing out that being a Night Owl is probably confounded (majorly) with a significant range of other health and lifestyle factors. This is always a major challenge in these types of studies. It's useful research - but it often ends up as a news headline "doing X is a factor in Death." Which is often misleading.
- 9y ago

smoyer 9y ago

It's interesting to me that the ascribed the increase in mortality for night-owls to the fact that their schedule doesn't mesh with societies expectations - I suspect they'll also find that it's not good to have a sleep cycle that's too out-of-sync with the daylight hours (we already know a lack of sunlight during the winter hours affects some people and we use apps like F.Lux to dim our screens to avoid tricking our minds with extra daylight frequencies).

teawrecks 9y ago

I remember seeing this same conclusion from a study over 5 years ago. That one also mistook correlation for causation.

pradn 9y ago

There are a thousand of these health/nutrition articles every year, all telling you that this or that has a small effect on your health and life. Given how hard it is to reproduce these studies and how minimal the effects are, I find it hard to care.

cgh 9y ago
They are epidemiological and their goal isn't to really prove anything but to generate new hypotheses and provide hints for directions of research based on the correlations found. Unfortunately, the popular press doesn't tend to distinguish between epidemiology and more rigorous double-blind studies.

limeblack 9y ago

As someone who has worked nightshift, I have heard it can cause cancer. It doesn't look good for us. [1]: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312064.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312064.php

baccheion 9y ago
Is it due to not getting enough sunlight (vitamin D)?

aje403 9y ago

“For example, some studies have shown that evening people are less likely to eat a healthy diet and more likely to use substances such as alcohol and illegal drugs, compared with morning people.” Where can I acquire research funding? I have groundbreaking hypotheses I would like to test such as “people who smile more are happier” or “people who have high net worth are more likely to purchase expensive watches”. I am highly qualified to pursue this research - I have a solid foundation in high school statistics and took a freshman sociology course.

ivraatiems 9y ago
What common sense would suggest is true very often doesn't align with what research has found to actually be true. Don't take the world for granted. Don't assume you understand something just because the answer seems obvious. In fact, the example you gave - people who smile more are happier - is true, but the cause is possibly the opposite of what the sentence implies. Some people are happy more because they force themselves to smile; they're not smiling because they're happy.[1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-make-you-happier/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-ma...
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  On the other hand, throwing enough p = .05 studies at the world lets you 'learn' all sorts of unintuitive - and untrue - things. That smiling/happiness result, for example, looks to be another casualty of the replication crisis. [1] Could it be true? Maybe, but at the quality of existing research it's not clear studying it was an improvement on intuition. Checking our instincts with data is a good thing to do, but it's hardly a silver bullet when searching for the truth. [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/08/can_smiling_make_you_happier_maybe_maybe_not_we_have_no_idea.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
  - imh 9y ago
    Those are two entirely separate questions. Poorly designed studies vs the studies's subject matter.

didibus 9y ago

If you have a fringe behaviour on any dimensions, where you are unlike the average, there are only two possibilities, you've evolved a superior trait, or you've evolved an inferior trait. I feel evolutionary wise, chances are higher that you've evolved an inferior trait. I am offset in my sleep, 3am to noon, and I need a minimum of 9hours to feel rested, 10hour of sleep is ideal. Now to be honest, this doesn't sound like the recipe to a superior trait, so I'm not too surprised if it ended up costing me something like additional health issues later in life. Sadly :(

m3kw9 9y ago

Seem like a narrow minded study that found a consistent variable coincidentally and pointing it out as the cause

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

"The researchers said society needs to recognize that making night owls start work early may not be good for their health." It's not that being a night owl means you are going to die sooner, it's that a society run by morning larks is detrimental to night owl health.

baccheion 9y ago

Adrenal burnout is associated with rising energy levels as the day progresses (ie, one way to create a night owl) and a constant stress state. NutrEval (include hormone panel) catches many imbalances/deficiencies. It can almost be assumed vitamin D (+ K), vitamin E, and magnesium are low. Vitamin D (+ K) strongly affects the pineal gland and melatonin release. Resveratrol in the morning resets circadian rhythm, as does melatonin at night. If fixing deficiencies/imbalances does not "normalize" circadian rhythm, then that's the natural rhythm and is something to work around.