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Regularity

National Sleep Foundation (NSF): 

The importance of sleep regularity, defined as the consistency of sleep-wake timing from day to day, is increasingly recognized as crucial for health, alongside sleep duration. The National Sleep Foundation's panel, including Harvard-affiliated researchers, has highlighted that both the duration and regularity of sleep are important for long-term health and daily performance. This conclusion was based on an extensive review of over 40,000 papers. Sleep irregularity was found to be associated with a range of adverse outcomes including worse metabolic outcomes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and increased inflammatory markers. It was also noted that sleep duration and quality tend to be worse with sleep irregularity.

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Sleep (Journal):

Further underscoring the importance of sleep regularity, a study published in "Sleep" in 2023 demonstrated that sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration. This study, which utilized data from over 10 million hours of accelerometer data from 60,977 UK Biobank participants, found that higher sleep regularity was associated with a significantly lower risk of all-cause mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiometabolic mortality. The study adjusted for various factors like age, sex, ethnicity, and lifestyle, and indicated that maintaining regular sleep patterns may be an effective target for improving overall health and survival. More specifically, those in the highest (regular) relative to the lowest (worse) 20th% of sleep regularity, night to night had a 49% decreased risk of all-cause mortality, a 39% decreased risk of cancer mortality, and a 57% decreased risk of cardiometabolic mortality. Thus, irregular sleep and short sleep duration are both predictors of premature mortality, but sleep regularity was statistically even stronger as a predictor then sleep duration.

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In summary, sleep regularity is not just a matter of convenience or preference, but a significant health consideration. Regular sleep patterns contribute to better metabolic health, cardiovascular function, and reduced inflammation. Most notably, maintaining regular sleep patterns appears to have a substantial impact on reducing the risk of mortality, including cancer and cardiometabolic deaths. This makes sleep regularity an essential aspect of public health guidelines and individual health practices.

 

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