Late sleepers can reset their internal body clocks to bounce out of bed earlier with a few practical life hacks — which can indeed make them healthy, wealthy and wise.
In fact, new international research being published in the journal Sleep Medicine found that making four lifestyle changes each day helped subjects stick with an earlier bedtime and wake up routine after just three weeks — and the new early birds reported feeling less depressed and stressed under their new sleep schedule.
The Universities of Birmingham and Surrey in the U.K. and Monash University in Australia conducted a small, randomized control trial with 22 healthy men and women in their 20s over six weeks. The participants were night owls, defined as individuals whose internal body clocks dictated later-than-usual sleep and wake times: going to bed at 2:30 a.m. on average, and rising at 10:15 a.m. They wore sleep trackers and filled out questionnaires about their daily sleep and eating habits for two weeks before the study, to provide a baseline of their lifestyle habits.
Then they were randomly assigned to either an experimental group that was instructed to practice several sleep interventions to shift to an early sleep schedule (including going to bed and waking up two to three hours earlier), while the control group was only told to eat lunch at the same time every day, without being directed to change sleep habits. They provided regular saliva samples to the researchers to measure their melatonin (sleep hormone) and cortisol (stress hormone) during the study, and returned to the lab for testing after the three-week experimental period was completed.
And the experimental group that adopted the new sleep habits consistently went to bed almost two hours earlier in the evening, and rose almost two hours earlier the next morning, without the length or the quality of their sleep suffering. What’s more, their self-reported feelings of depression and stress “significantly decreased,” according to the report. And rather than being groggy in the mornings, they also reported increased cognitive reaction time and physical performance early in the day, and their peak performance times moved up to the afternoon; previously, they peaked at night. They also ate breakfast more often.
More than a third of sleep-deprived American adults are getting less than the recommended seven hours of sleep a night, according to the CDC, which costs the U.S. economy $411 billion a year in lost productivity. And so Americans spent $41 billion on sleep aids in 2015, which is projected to hit $52 billion by next year.
These are the four (free!) steps that converted the night owls into morning larks:
- Rise and shine. Wake up two to three hours earlier than usual, and maximize outdoor light exposure in the morning. Research has shown that light decreases your body’s production of the sleep-inducing melatonin hormone. So throwing open your curtains to let the sun in, or eating breakfast on the porch or by a window, provides a free morning boost. Plus, getting up earlier in the morning helps you feel sleepy earlier in the evening.
- Lights out. At the end of the day, you want to do the opposite: limit light exposure, and hit the hay two to three hours earlier than usual. Now’s the time to increase your melatonin levels, so it’s important to turn off the lights — and to avoid the blue light from screens, in particular — to cue your body that it’s time to wind down.
- Stick to a schedule. Keep sleep and wake times fixed on both work days and days off. While it’s tempting to take advantage of the weekend to stay up late and sleep in, it throws your body’s circadian rhythm out of whack. Instead, keep the same schedule (within 15 and 30 minutes) every single day.
- Move up your meals. Have breakfast as soon as possible after waking up; eat lunch at the same time each day; and don’t do dinner after 7 p.m. Participants in the study also stopped drinking caffeine after 3 p.m. If it’s impossible to move up dinner or other evening activities, then shorten them, or see which ones can be done on alternate days, so that you’re still wrapping things up earlier.
If the subjects were regular exercisers, they also moved their workouts to the morning. The research is divided on whether nighttime workouts make it harder to fall asleep or not, but morning workouts have been linked with people falling asleep earlier. “This also helps with light exposure and the awakening of the senses,” said Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist in New York City who was not part of the study. “This helps us burn energy quickly and early on, making it easier to sleep later on at night.
And while naps are recommended to help supplement sleep and fight fatigue in the afternoon, the participants were told not to nap after 4 p.m., as catching 40 winks later in the day can interfere with your nighttime sleep.
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“We wanted to see if there were simple things people could do at home to solve this issue. This was successful, on average allowing people to get to sleep and wake up around two hours earlier than they were before,” said study co-author Dr. Andrew Bagshaw from the University of Birmingham in a statement. “Most interestingly, this was also associated with improvements in mental well-being and perceived sleepiness, meaning that it was a very positive outcome for the participants.”
Dr. Hafeez, who is also a faculty member at Columbia University, told MarketWatch that these interventions align with common suggestions that sleep experts give to patients — although if your “night owl” bedtime is 11 p.m. as opposed to 2:30 a.m., moving it up three hours may not be practical. “I think more research is needed as to the effectiveness of this particular intervention in relation to average people who may go to bed between 9 and 11 p.m. Would they be going to sleep too early if they forwarded their sleep time to 6 or 7 p.m? I think so,” she said, suggesting that such sleepers move up their bedtime by an hour, at first, to see if it makes them more productive.
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She also cautioned that three weeks is only a reasonable time period to make these new habits stick if one leads a relatively stress-free life that’s not burdened by health issues, being a caretaker, being a parent, or economic or emotional struggles. “For regular folk, implementing all these changes at once could be overwhelming — stressful even. Overwhelming your life routine with changes in sleep time, dietary schedule and fitness activity all at the same time can stress you out and have the adverse effect of discouraging you,” she said. “Instead, I would suggest implementing one or two intervention methods per week and seeing how you feel. Give yourself four to six weeks, so you have built-in time to observe what works for you.”
Previous research has suggested that the early bird does indeed get the worm. A survey of 2,000 Americans by OnePoll on behalf of mattress review site Sleepopolis found that those who rose earlier earned more money (although it didn’t specify how much) compared to those who stayed up late. Perhaps this is because “morning bias” has been shown to give early birds better performance reviews; a 2014 University of Washington Foster School of Business study found employees who chose to work an early shift (7 a.m. to 3 p.m.) were rated better by their supervisors than those who worked the 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift. The same study found more people associated the word “morning” with “conscientiousness” compared to “evening.” The standard 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday is also better suited to those with earlier wakeup calls.
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Early risers in the Sleepopolis survey also had sex more often (three times a week compared to night owls in the survey getting intimate twice a week), and they got an extra hour of sleep each night. Perhaps that’s why they also reported being 10% happier.
Getting enough sleep could be more important for losing weight than skipping late-night snacks, according to a recent study published in the online journal BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health.
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