Good question—I don’t think we know as much about that as would be ideal.
In laboratory studies and among shift workers (people working during the night and sleeping during the day), there’s a bunch of studies that find negative effects if your sleeping/waking schedule is misaligned with your circadian rhythm (see the sleep timing section here https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218(14)00013-8/pdf). However, I don’t know of studies testing just sleep timing in real-world normal populations.
More broadly, sleep hygiene is helpful for insomnia, but much less so than CBT-I (e.g. this meta-analysis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29194467). However, according to the doctors I spoke with, sleep hygiene is often used as a first-line treatment because people can easily test it at home, and they should get results within a month of consistent use if sleep hygiene will help. It sounds like most people who have insomnia have already taken care of basic sleep hygiene, though both of the sleep specialists I interviewed (Dr. Bertisch and Dr. Barger) emphasized consistent sleep schedules as one of the most important sleep hygiene tips people commonly miss.
However, that doesn’t address the specific details of what counts as consistent times. For people with insomnia, Stimulus Control Therapy indicates you shouldn’t go to bed until you feel sleepy but should wake up at the same time. So if that’s you, I expect setting a consistent alarm time regardless of when you went to bed might be good.
There’s a relatively high cost in making a personal policy that results in not going to parties that result in being in bed at 1AM for it being possible to wake up at 7AM everyday which is needed on some days to be at the office early enough.
I’m not convinced that the benefit is worth that cost. Being strongly convinced would like be a requirement to be able to muster the willpower to try it out for 6 weeks.
If it’s the case that what multiple sleep specialists consider to be one of the most important sleep hygiene tips people commonly miss was without evidence that would seem strange to me. It might still be good advice, but a research failure if nobody investigates when that tip is useful.
They don’t have RTCs of just sleep timing in everyday settings; that’s not the same as not having evidence. Sleep specialists have a theory of why sleep timing is important, RTCs of sleep hygiene that show a moderate effect on insomnia, and personal experience working with patients. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have research in finer grained detail, but there is evidence supporting the doctor’s recommendations.
Does that mean it will work for you? Not necessarily. Based on the overall performance of sleep hygiene, I would expect at most a modest improvement in sleep quality. It’s your call whether poor sleep negatively impacts your life enough that a modest improvement in expectation is worth leaving parties early for a month. It’s totally fair if the information value isn’t worth that cost to you.
Good question—I don’t think we know as much about that as would be ideal.
In laboratory studies and among shift workers (people working during the night and sleeping during the day), there’s a bunch of studies that find negative effects if your sleeping/waking schedule is misaligned with your circadian rhythm (see the sleep timing section here https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218(14)00013-8/pdf). However, I don’t know of studies testing just sleep timing in real-world normal populations.
More broadly, sleep hygiene is helpful for insomnia, but much less so than CBT-I (e.g. this meta-analysis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29194467). However, according to the doctors I spoke with, sleep hygiene is often used as a first-line treatment because people can easily test it at home, and they should get results within a month of consistent use if sleep hygiene will help. It sounds like most people who have insomnia have already taken care of basic sleep hygiene, though both of the sleep specialists I interviewed (Dr. Bertisch and Dr. Barger) emphasized consistent sleep schedules as one of the most important sleep hygiene tips people commonly miss.
However, that doesn’t address the specific details of what counts as consistent times. For people with insomnia, Stimulus Control Therapy indicates you shouldn’t go to bed until you feel sleepy but should wake up at the same time. So if that’s you, I expect setting a consistent alarm time regardless of when you went to bed might be good.
There’s a relatively high cost in making a personal policy that results in not going to parties that result in being in bed at 1AM for it being possible to wake up at 7AM everyday which is needed on some days to be at the office early enough.
I’m not convinced that the benefit is worth that cost. Being strongly convinced would like be a requirement to be able to muster the willpower to try it out for 6 weeks.
If it’s the case that what multiple sleep specialists consider to be one of the most important sleep hygiene tips people commonly miss was without evidence that would seem strange to me. It might still be good advice, but a research failure if nobody investigates when that tip is useful.
They don’t have RTCs of just sleep timing in everyday settings; that’s not the same as not having evidence. Sleep specialists have a theory of why sleep timing is important, RTCs of sleep hygiene that show a moderate effect on insomnia, and personal experience working with patients. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have research in finer grained detail, but there is evidence supporting the doctor’s recommendations.
Does that mean it will work for you? Not necessarily. Based on the overall performance of sleep hygiene, I would expect at most a modest improvement in sleep quality. It’s your call whether poor sleep negatively impacts your life enough that a modest improvement in expectation is worth leaving parties early for a month. It’s totally fair if the information value isn’t worth that cost to you.
Good answer, I think the whole topic needs to be explored more. World wide production would increase if we could understand sleeping better.