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New Research Reveals Health Benefits of Waking One Hour Earlier
A small shift in sleep time can help boost your mood exponentially
When it comes to sleep, it can seem the world is divided into “Larks” and “Owls”. Larks are those who bound out of bed at the first glimmer of dawn, whereas owls just get going when darkness sets in.
We often assume that these labels are immutable. I think of my mother who still needs her “tup of toffee,” as I called it at three years old, before she can have a coherent conversation after rising, or conversely my father who happily got up with me at 5:30am on Christmas morning to inspect Santa’s gifts.
“You’re not going to change me now,” both would say decades later, still prone to their lark- and owlish inclinations — and they would probably be right, at least by instinct. Up to forty percent of our sleep-timing preference — or sleep chronotype — is determined by genetics.
But new genetic research at the University of Boulder and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard shows that not only can a person shift their sleep time, but also that doing so even one hour earlier, especially for “night owls”, can help to fend off depression and maintain a brighter, more balanced mood.
