What Time is the Golden Hour for Sleep for Overall Wellbeing?

If you’re a regular reader of health domain articles, you must be well aware of one of the most crucial facts that supports your entire health for active functioning of all organs is getting enough sleep. Good quality sleep and adequate amount of sleep a day can safeguard your health from various health conditions starting from hormonal imbalance to heart diseases. Sleep not only helps in improving physical health but also has a significant effect on psychological and emotional health. But, how many of you people are aware of the proper or golden hour for sleep to improve your health in a long run?

None? Well, studies and researches have found that there is an optimum timing to go to sleep which improves heart health as well as overall health. If you think, that your bedtime is when you decide to fall asleep, you’re absolutely following a wrong sleeping habit that can affect your health negatively, and many be already doing. 

The Golden Hours to Sleep

Researchers and experts have to say that, there is actually an ideal timing to retire to your bed for improving your heart health. According to new studies from the United Kingdom, in order to protect your heart, going to bed between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. is beneficial and healthful. The optimum time to go to sleep lies in a specific point in human body’s 24-hour cycle and the deviations form it can be disadvantageous to health, according to Dr. David Plans, senior lecturer in organizational neuroscience, the University of Exeter. The most-riskiest time to fall asleep is after midnight, as it reduces the likelihood of getting glimpse morning light, which helps in resetting the body’s natural clock.

The human body has its own 24-hour internal clock, which is popularly called as circadian rhythm. However, the studies haven’t proved and concluded the causation but the results suggest that early retiring to bed or late to bed are associated with disrupting the body’s clock with detrimental consequences especially for cardiovascular health. Studies have also proved that poor sleepers live a shorter life for any reason according to Dr. Thomas Kilkenny, the director of sleep medicine at Staten Island University Hospital, New York, which means both early to bed or late to bed increases risk of cardiovascular diseases.

Circadian Rhythm Function for Sleep

Circadian rhythm is defined as to describe human brain’s natural sleep-wake schedule or timing. It’s like human’s personal internal clock. Every individual experience natural dip in alertness or while staying awake and increased wakefulness during specific times in a 24-hour cycle. People are maximum sleepiest at two points in a day which is between 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. and in a night between 2 a.m. – 4 a.m. which means there is a golden hour for sleep to improve your heart health.

The more better-quality sleep you get, the less likely you will experience significant daytime sleepiness or afternoon slump. Circadian rhythm also affects your natural bed timing schedule and morning wakeup schedules. According to experts, if an individual gets used to going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, his brain naturally gets adapted to this schedule. Over a period of time, people might find themselves going to bed quite easily at night and waking up right before your alarm clock strikes.

Reasons to Go to Bed Between Golden Hours of Sleep

According to a study which involved more than 88,000 people aged from 43 to 79 who agreed to fetch data on their bedtime and waking-up time in a day for 7 days straight using an accelerometer. The participants also finished the demographic, health, lifestyle, and physical assessments. Then the researchers analyzed the study group for over a 5.7-year period for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, such as a heart failure, heart attack, chronic ischemic heart disease, heart strokes, and transient ischemic attack. The researchers later concluded that 3 percent of participants later developed cardiovascular diseases as they used to sleep early or late which was before 10 p.m. or after 11 p.m.

According to the results and figures, 25 percent greater risk of cardiovascular diseases was found among the participants who fell asleep at midnight or later, 12 percent highest risk of cardiovascular diseases for people who went to bed between 11:00 p.m. and 11:59 p.m., and 24 percent increased risk of heart or cardiovascular disease for those people who fell asleep before 10:00 p.m. Hence the golden hours for sleep to improve heart and overall health is between 10 p.m. to 100 p.m. The relation between sleep onset and heart disease risk was quite higher among women. The reason may be due to sex difference in the manner your endocrine system responds to a disruption in circadian rhythm cycle.