Waking up an hour earlier can fight depression, a study says
Waking up an hour earlier can fight depression. A study conducted by a research team at the University of Colorado seems to suggest that waking up at least an hour earlier in the morning can significantly reduce the risk of depression.
The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Colorado, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, involved 840,000 people and seems to offer a more than solid argument in favor of the belief that the propensity to sleep more or less in the morning is linked to the risk of depression.
This is the first study of its kind that quantifies the magnitude of the risk.
Previous research has shown that night owls are twice as likely to get depression as early risers, regardless of how long they sleep.
But since it is known that mood disorders can upset the sleep-wake rhythm, scholars have worked hard to discover the connection we are talking about.
What does “early riser” mean?
To understand exactly how much earlier the wake-up call was needed, lead researcher Lyas Daghlas used data provided by the company 23 and Me, which sells genetic tests to individuals to discover their ethnic origins, and the UK Biobank biomedical database.
It is known that a person’s “chronotype” (whether one is an early riser or a night owl) is linked to more than 340 genetic variants and that the genetics of each account for roughly 12 to 42 percent of our sleep preferences.
To understand how genes affect sleep times, the researchers evaluated data for these variants from more than 850,000 anonymous patients, including 85,000 whose sleep had been monitored for a week and 250,000 who had answered a questionnaire about sleep. theme. This allowed scholars to draw a rather detailed picture.
In the largest sample, about one third of the subjects said they were early risers, nine percent were night owls, and the rest were somewhere in between. On average, the time when most reached the midpoint of their night’s sleep was three a.m., which means they went to sleep at 11pm and woke up at 6am.
Knowing this, the researchers looked at another sample, which this time included genetic information and anonymous data on diagnosing important depressive disorders.
The question was, do the genetic variants that make a person early also protect them from the risk of depression?
The very clear answer is yes.
23 percent
In short, the research concluded that if a person who has a habit of going to sleep at 1am goes there at midnight and sleeps the same number of hours (thus waking up an hour earlier), the risk of getting sick depression decreases 23 percent off.
In his pocket a degree in food science, on his fingers a great passion for writing. I am particularly interested in the themes of recycling and do-it-yourself, but I like to write about any subject, as long as it is curious and engaging. and I like photography and travel.
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