People with irregular sleeping patterns are 26% more likely to have a stroke or heart attack compared to those with regular sleep routines, academics have said.
A new study has found that going to sleep and waking up at the same time can protect individuals from developing heart failure.
Prior research has revealed that getting between seven and nine hours of sleep per night is beneficial for your health.
However, this study has highlighted the positive impact of irregular sleep – sleeping without any real schedule, for instance going to bed and waking up at different times each day.
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Sleeping for eight hours is not enough to combat poor health outcomes if you go to bed and wake up at varied times each day, the research has reported.
Senior author Jean-Philippe Chaput said: “We should aim to wake up and go to sleep within 30 minutes of the same time each night and each morning, including weekends.
“Within an hour of the same time is good but less good than 30 minutes, and even better is to have zero variation.”
He added: “Beyond an hour’s difference each night and each morning means irregular sleep. That can have negative health impacts. The closer you are to zero variation the better.
“No one is perfect across a whole year, and if you don’t have a regular sleep pattern for one or two days a week, it’s not going to kill you. But if you repeatedly have irregular sleep, five or six days a week, then it becomes chronic, and that is a problem.”
He continued: “Waking up at different times each morning really messes with your internal clock, and that can have adverse health consequences.
“If you need to catch up on sleep you’ve missed during the week at weekends, then going to bed earlier is better than lying in – you should still be trying to wake up at the same time, even on Saturday and Sundays.”
More than 72,000 adults from the UK Biobank study took part in the trial. For a week, each participant wore an activity device so the research team could calculate a sleep regularity index (SRI) score for each person.
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The scores ranged from 0 (very irregular) to 100 (perfectly regular sleep-wake pattern), and the participants were placed into one of three groups – irregular sleep group (SRI score less than 71.6), moderately irregular sleep group (SRI between 71.6 and 87.3), or regular sleep group (SRI score more than 87.3).
Participants in the irregular sleep group were roughly a quarter more at risk of suffering a stroke or heart attack compared to those in the other groups, the study has reported.
In addition, those in the moderately irregular sleep group were nearly 10% more likely to experience a major adverse cardiac event compared to the participants in other groups, the research has identified.
The authors concluded: “Our results suggest that sleep regularity may be more relevant than sufficient sleep duration in modulating major adverse cardiovascular event risk.”
Read more in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
