Boulder City, USA: If you are depressed and depressed, waking up an hour earlier can save you from a horrific attack. The findings are published in the latest issue of the Journal of American Psychiatry.
The study looked at 840,000 people, not just one or two, and summed up that if you woke up an hour earlier, the severity of depression could be reduced by 23%. Scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Broad Institute and Harvard conducted the study.
Most people in the survey were strongly persuaded to go to bed on time and wake up in what is called a chronotype and suffer from psychological depression. The first-of-its-kind survey seeks to gauge the extent to which mental or psychological changes are more or less the same.
Lockdowns and epidemics have affected people’s sleep patterns around the world, and this is why this investigation is so important.
“We know the relationship between sleep patterns and mood, but we don’t know what the benefits and harms of this sleep deprivation can be,” said Seleni Vetter, a scientist involved in the study. He insists that waking up an hour earlier than scheduled can significantly reduce depression.
Previous research has shown that women and men who stay up all night are twice as likely to be depressed as those who wake up earlier, no matter how long they sleep. But it was not studied in detail and the link between sleep and depression was not clear.
Earlier in 2018, the same team surveyed 32,000 nurses, which found that those who “woke up early” had a 27% lower risk of developing depression within four years. But the question remains, what does it mean to be “early awake”?
Although millions of people were included in the study, 85,000 people were given sleep recordings for a week. They were told to reduce their sleep. It was found that those who woke up an hour earlier had a 23% lower risk of depression. Similarly, going to bed at eleven o’clock at night instead of one o’clock at night can also reduce depression.
Experts believe that waking up early gives light to the day and has an effect on body hormones, which reduces stress and averts the risk of depression. But the final answer in this regard requires detailed research.