Going to bed at the weekend when you are used to getting up early all week can affect your mood and increase your risk of depression, according to a new study.
Experts from Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan, use sleep and mood data from 2,100 physicians who previously took careers.
An irregular sleep program can increase the risk of depression just as much as getting fewer hours of sleep or staying up late regularly.
If you sleep on a Sunday, it can even affect your Monday morning mood, making them as grumpy as you would be if you stayed up late on Sunday night.
Researchers have not studied the effect of mixed sleep schedules on the wider population, but believe it may apply to anyone with irregular sleep patterns.
In a new study, you can influence the mood over the weekend if you are used to getting up early all week.
The medical interns in this study went to medical school in their first year of training and experienced long, intense working days and irregular schedules – changing from day to day without any real structure.
These changes changed their ability to have regular sleep schedules and made them the perfect subjects for an investigation into irregular patterns of sleep and mood.
Data were collected by tracking their sleep and other activities through wrist devices and recording their mood on a smartphone app.
They also took quarterly tests for depression during the year-long study.
The new article, published in the journal npj Digital Medicine, examines the impact that this unusual mixture of broken and irregular sleep has on the mind.
The researchers found that those whose devices showed that they had different sleep schedules were higher on standard questionnaires for depressive symptoms, and that they had less daily mood swings.
Those who stay up late regularly or sleep the least hours also have higher on depressive symptoms and lower on the daily mood.
The findings contribute to what is already known about the link between sleep, daily mood and long-term risk of depression.
“The advanced portable technology enables us to study the behavioral and physiological factors of mental health, including sleep, on a much larger scale and more accurately than before,” said Yu Fang, lead author of the new article.
“Our findings are not only aimed at directing self-management over sleeping habits, but also at informing institutional scheduling structures,” the research specialist added.
Fang is part of the team of the Internal Health Study, led by Srijan Sen, MD, Ph.D., who has been studying the mood and depression risk of first-year medical residents for more than a decade.
The study collected an average of two weeks of data from before the doctors’ internships began, and an average of four months of monitoring throughout the year.
Cathy Goldstein, MD, MS, an associate professor of neurology and physician at the Sleep Disorders Center in Michigan Medicine, said that portable devices that estimate sleep are now used by millions of people around the world.
Experts from Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan, used sleep and mood data from 2,100 physicians in the early career that took more than a year.
These include the Fitbit devices used in the study, other activity trackers and smart watches such as the Apple Watch.
“These devices allow us to record sleep for long periods of time without effort on behalf of the user,” says Goldstein.
“We still have questions about the accuracy of the sleep predictions that the consumer’s trackers make, although the initial work suggests that they are similar to clinical and actigraphic devices for research cleared by the FDA. ‘
Sen said the new findings build on what his team’s work has already shown about the high risk of depression among new physicians.
“These findings highlight the consistency of sleep as an underestimated factor in considering depression and well-being,” he says.
“The work also highlights the potential of portable devices to understand important constructions relevant to health that we have not been able to study on a large scale before.”
The team notes that the relatively young group of people in the study – with an average age of 27 years, who hold both university and medical degrees – are not representative of the wider population.
However, because everyone experiences similar workloads and schedules, it is a good group to test hypotheses and get a broad view of the broader population.
The researchers hope that other groups will study other populations using similar devices and approaches to see if the findings about the variation in the sleep scheme hold for them, and thus can be applied more broadly to the population.
Fang, for example, notes that the parents of young children can still be an important group to study.
“I also wish my 1-year-old could learn about these findings and only wake up every day at 08:21,” she jokes.
The findings were published in the journal Digital Medicine.
Exposure to blue light from phones and computer screens ‘makes it harder to fall asleep’
Dhruvin Patel, a leading ophthalmologist, is a specialist in the impact of blue light on eye health – that is light produced by telephone and computer screens.
Blue Light can make it harder to fall asleep and affect eye health
Researchers say exposure to blue light can increase the risk of vision damage and make it harder to fall asleep.
Patel shared his tips for minimizing the impact of blue light while working from home or using screens.
1. Work an arm’s length from the screen
Extend your arm completely and work from a distance – look from your eyes to the end of your fingertips.
Use it as a minimum distance to reduce the tension on your eyeballs.
2. 20/20/20
Simply put, look at least 20 feet away from the screen every 20 minutes.
This will help you restore your visual systems and eye through long periods of screen work.
3. Screen height
Height and level of your monitor can have a big impact on eye strain.
Research has shown that it is better for the screen to be higher than the users’ viewing level – the center should be 5-6 centimeters below the straight line of the user’s vision.
This opens up the space between the upper and lower eyelid, which is often dry in the eyes.
4. Lighting
Position the computer screen to avoid glare, especially through overexposure or windows.
Use blinds or curtains on windows and replace the light bulbs in desk lamps with lower wattage and intensity light bulbs.
If there is no way to minimize glare from light sources, consider using an anti-glare filter.
5. Place a post-it note on your screen titled ‘BLINK’.
Normally we cut up to 20 times within a minute. It is automatically controlled by our central nervous systems, so we are not aware of the blink.
It is reduced on screens to 3-5 times per minute, which means that we can not maintain tear films and that the eye does not remain smeared.
A post-it note on your monitor that says ‘Blink’ should help you consciously try to cut. It’s simple, but it definitely works.
6) Consider your device
Usually the biggest, latest phone is the best, but not for your eyes. An iPhone X is 20 percent brighter than an iPhone 6 and gives higher levels of blue light.
This is the difference in a 100 percent increase in harmful exposure to blue light!
7. Remember to turn off
I suggest that no digital devices or artificial lighting take place after sunset. If you’re like most people, you’re probably going to email at the last minute or finish your favorite show on Netflix before you go to bed.
Try reading a book or start the meditation you promised yourself in the new year.
Dhruvin Patel says you should not assume that ‘night mode’ or ‘blue shading’ on devices is enough to counteract the impact of blue light.
He said it was ‘proven that it does not facilitate sleep compared to the normal output of a screen’, and even if it is activated, you should still avoid the screen after sunset, if possible.
Patel founded a company called Ocushield, which manufactures screen protectors to filter out blue light based on its research into the impact of the light source.
Source: Dhruvin Patel (Ocushield)