How a Regular Sleep Schedule Benefits Your Health

New research confirms what doctors have long advised: going to bed and waking up at the same time every day for great health benefits.

There are some tried-and-tested tips sleep doctors always give for battling insomnia: Watch out for those alcoholic beverages at dinner, cut out the after-hours coffee, noon, stop scrolling before going to bed. And please, they're begging you: Keep your sleep schedule consistent.

Flip-flop between waking times - wake up with a start at 7:30 a.m. on Friday morning, then dozing off until Saturday afternoon - wreaks havoc on our internal clocks. Sleep experts call it "social jet lag," said Dr. Sabra Abbott, a sleep medicine specialist at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. Similar to changing time zones, going to bed at wildly different times from night to night can disrupt your circadian rhythm.

And yet, like anyone who worked nights, caring for a toddler, or coming home from a party might tell you: going to bed and waking up at the same times is easier said than done. "It's a luxury, isn't it?" said Kelsie Full, behavioral epidemiologist and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Dr. Full is the lead author of a new study that has linked irregular sleep to an early marker of cardiovascular disease. Researchers looked at week-long sleep data from 2,000 adults over the age of 45 and found that those who slept more or less each night and went to bed at different times were more likely to have hardened arteries than those whose sleep patterns were more regular.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">People whose overall amount of sleep varied by two hours or more from night to night throughout week - sleeping five hours on Tuesday, for example, then eight hours on Wednesday - were particularly likely to have high levels of calcified fatty plaque built up in their arteries, compared to those who slept the same number of hours each night.

The study could not confirm that the inconsistent sleep patterns definitely caused the heart problems, Dr. Full said. And the results don't necessarily mean the occasional late night or very early morning shouldn't be off the table. Tianyi Huang, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study. "It's more of a long-term pattern."

For most people, if you get a night or two of inconsistent hours of sleep, you're probably not going to throw off your entire circadian rhythm, said Aric Prather, a psychologist and sleep expert at the University of California, San Francisco. And if you go to bed at 4 a.m. on a Saturday, you'd probably be better off sleeping until noon and avoiding some of the acute effects of sleep loss than forcing yourself to wake up the moment you get up to work, he said. p>

But the new study confirms what previous research has theorized: consistent sleep is crucial for health. A 2020 study found that people aged 45 to 84 with irregular sleep schedules were nearly twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease as those with more regular sleep patterns. An analysis of more than 90,000 people linked circadian rhythm disturbances to an increased risk of mood disorders. Researchers have even linked irregular sleep patterns to high cholesterol and hypertension.

Over the past decade, researchers have strengthened the link between sleep and heart health, especially...