What time you need to go to bed to avoid mental health problems

Owl be damned!

New research finds that being a night owl is bad for your mental health. Going to bed by 1 a.m. can lower your risk of developing mental and behavioral conditions such as depression and anxiety, according to a study published last month in the journal Psychiatry Research.

Researchers compared the preferred sleep timing, known as chronotype, with the actual sleep behavior of nearly 74,000 UK adults.

The researchers expected that staying true to your chronotype would be very important.

But they found that no matter your sleep preference, night owls aren’t thriving after dark.

“We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it’s being up late that is not good for your mental health,” senior study author Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, explained in a statement. “The big unknown is why.”

Among the participants, 19,065 identified as morning types, 6,844 as evening types and 47,979 as somewhere in the middle.

Night owls who aligned with their chronotype were 20% to 40% more likely to have a mental health disorder diagnosis compared with night owls on an early or intermediate sleep schedule, the researchers determined.

Those who rise with the sun tend to have the best mental health.

Researchers mused that the results may be tied to the “mind after midnight” hypothesis, which says that being awake after midnight can increase your risk of impulsive and harmful behaviors.

“If I had to hazard a guess, morning people who are up late are quite cognizant of the fact that their brain isn’t working quite right, so they may put off making bad decisions,” Zeitzer said.

“Meanwhile, the evening person who is up late thinks, ‘I’m feeling great. This is a great decision I’m making at 3 o’clock in the morning,’” he added.

Experts recommend getting seven to nine hours of shuteye a night. Zeitzer counsels night owls to try to adopt an earlier routine to shift their sleep patterns, even though it’s difficult and won’t change their chronotype.

“Biologically speaking, it’s very much like a rubber band — you take a day off and you snap back to where your body wants to be,” he said.

Meanwhile, a professor of sleep medicine pointed out some limitations to Zeitzer’s study to HuffPost on Monday.

The subjects are mostly white and middle-aged or older, said Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula of the University of Pennsylvania. Plus, chronotype was determined through a participant questionnaire.

“The way [researchers] decided which chronotype you are came from a single question, although they did use one that has been validated,” said Gurubhagavatula, who is not affiliated with the study. “But typically how we assess morningness or eveningness is with a much more thorough questionnaire that has a lot more detailed questions.”