STUDY: WAKE UP AN HOUR EARLIER, CUT YOUR DEPRESSION RISK BY 23 PERCENT

[Michie]

END YESTERDAY EARLIER, START TODAY EARLIER — AND, AS AN INCREDIBLE NEW STUDY TELLS US, POTENTIALLY MUCH, MUCH BETTER.

Anyone who’s not a morning person knows how patently wrong the 9-to-5 schedule of the world can feel. After all, the early bird gets the worm, and the Snooze button (a least to us non-morning people) is less a simple extension of sleep, and more an opioid-like drip of shelter for five more minutes from the hellish break of day.

So we’ll take all the motivation we can get — like this new finding, that waking up an hour earlier can cut your depression risk by 23 percent.

Yes, that’s right: 23 percent. The study, published this week in JAMA Psychiatry, was conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, Harvard, and MIT.

They combed over the genetic data of over 800,000 subjects from 23andMe and UK Biobank (data that’s been described as the “world’s largest imaging sample” in a recent study correlating any amount of drinking to brain damage). Of these subjects, 85,000 of them wore sleep trackers. Another 250,000 of them filled out sleep preference surveys, in which participants self-identified as larks (or morning people), night owls, or whatever’s in between.

Continued below.
Study: Wake Up an Hour Earlier, Cut Your Depression Risk by 23 Percent

 

[OldWiseGuy]

END YESTERDAY EARLIER, START TODAY EARLIER — AND, AS AN INCREDIBLE NEW STUDY TELLS US, POTENTIALLY MUCH, MUCH BETTER.

Anyone who’s not a morning person knows how patently wrong the 9-to-5 schedule of the world can feel. After all, the early bird gets the worm, and the Snooze button (a least to us non-morning people) is less a simple extension of sleep, and more an opioid-like drip of shelter for five more minutes from the hellish break of day.

So we’ll take all the motivation we can get — like this new finding, that waking up an hour earlier can cut your depression risk by 23 percent.

Yes, that’s right: 23 percent. The study, published this week in JAMA Psychiatry, was conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, Harvard, and MIT.

They combed over the genetic data of over 800,000 subjects from 23andMe and UK Biobank (data that’s been described as the “world’s largest imaging sample” in a recent study correlating any amount of drinking to brain damage). Of these subjects, 85,000 of them wore sleep trackers. Another 250,000 of them filled out sleep preference surveys, in which participants self-identified as larks (or morning people), night owls, or whatever’s in between.

Continued below.
Study: Wake Up an Hour Earlier, Cut Your Depression Risk by 23 Percent

It stands to reason that the more light/daylight/sunlight that falls on you the more mentally healthy you are, i.e. SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Many are prescribed 'light therapy' to fight depression especially in the northern regions with those long dark winters. While on a vacation in Anchorage I asked a fellow how people dealt with the long dark winters. "We drink our way through it", he quipped. That certainly doesn't help one's mental state either.

 

[Michie]

Oops! Wrong thread!

 

[Jeffwhosoever]

If you have trouble getting up and running to get outside at sunrise, you can buy special lights on Amazon that generate the right wavelengths to help. I used them in a process called chronotherapy to reset my schedule back to normal human time. I have trouble with 24 hour days and I found out that the human circadian clock per a medical study is more like 25 hours, so that is one reason we struggle with getting up on time every day.

 

[Jeshu]

i wonder about studies like this. It seems normal to me to get up early when you feel well, that is because we have energy then, however in my down spells i have much more trouble getting up, then i sleep in the afternoon and go early to bed at night. It is hard work being depressed. Most depressed people i know have a heavy duty sleeping pattern.

When a study finds that early risers have less depression then i think they are early risers because they have no depression, not that rising early harvests us less depression. If only depressed people would get up in time then they would be less depressed is the kind of attitudes you get from them. Blaming the victims rather than helping them.

 

[Lady Bug]

Oops! Wrong thread!

It seems like the right place to put this thread though.

 

[Unqualified]

I know people that get up an hour early and start off their day with the word. It prepares them, gets positive and wakes up. With coffee of course.