You must have come across this popular saying that early to bed and early to rise makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise. However, the findings of a new study have questioned this popular saying.
A study that has examined more than 26,000 people from the UK Biobank website has found that people who wake up late have better cognitive scores and hence are more productive. The researchers at Imperial College London found that sleep has an effect on brain performance and ‘night owls’ generally tend to have higher cognitive scores.
The findings of the study have been published in BMJ Public Health.
Night owls vs morning larks
Owls – or adults who are naturally more active in the evening – performed better in tests compared to those who were morning-oriented. Larks consistently showed the lowest cognitive scores in both groups analysed, with scores improving for ‘intermediate’ types – those who expressed a mild preference for either day or night – and reaching higher levels for evening types.
Evening types, or owls, scored about 13.5% higher than morning types in one group and 7.5% higher than morning types in another group. Intermediate sleepers – a mixture of both- also did better, scoring around 10.6% and 6.3% higher than morning types in the two groups.
Insomnia hampered the cognitive score
The researchers also found that while sleep duration was vital, people who reported insomnia did not score significantly lower in cognitive performance in their cohorts.
The study stressed that sleeping between 7-9 hours a night was optimum for brain function, boosting cognitive functions such as memory, reasoning and speed of processing information and sleeping for fewer than 7 hours or more than 9 hours had a damaging effect on the brain.
“We’ve found that sleep duration has a direct effect on brain function, and we believe that proactively managing sleep patterns is really important for boosting, and safeguarding, the way our brains work. We’d ideally like to see policy interventions to help sleep patterns improve in the general population,” said co-study leader Professor Daqing Ma, also at Imperial’s Department of Surgery and Cancer.