I've heard it said by various people (naturopaths, primarily, and I think also Dr Myhill) that it's best to go to bed early (9:30pm, say) because an hour's sleep before midnight is worth two after it, because human growth hormone is produced during the hours of sleep before midnight. This seems weird to me, and I wonder if there's any empirical basis to it that isn't confounded by the time that most people observed go to sleep. Is anybody better at googling this than I am? I'm wondering if I should try to drag my bedtime forward.
I agree it does not seem likely given altered cortisol production and also altered circadian rhythms . spending a long time in bed staring at the ceiling waiting for your body and brain to agree on its time to sleep is not fun . I spent more than a decade trying to fit in to a proper day night sleep pattern this kind of sleep hygiene just meant I really struggled with constant waves of tiredness throughout the day and then perversely spent the nights staring at the ceiling taking between two and four hours to finally drift off . I now sleep mainly in the daytime not good but better than ignoring my own body clock, perhaps if I moved to another time zone my sleep times would be less of a problem to the control freaks of our society who desperately want everyone to fit in to their particular concept of normal .
That's my question, really - is there any actual evidence for this or is it just one of those ideas that gets repeated uncritically so often that people end up believing it when they really shouldn't?
i can't speak to growth hormone, but i can say that my health is strongly mediated by quality of sleep the night before. this, in turn, is mediated by monitor off time, use of amber goggles, etc. [light timing, type, and intensity although not fully figured out], 6 hours of lying in the dark on my left side to calm my sympathetic nervous system and improve gastroparesis, bedtime itself, sleep time, amount /and timing/ of clonazepam and cetirizine, what occurred during the day and at night [e.g. stress or intolerances or activity], duration of sleep, urinary and various breathing issues, and unknown factors. but so many pwme have circadian issues that i'd guess you'd have to experiment. i had phase delay my whole childhood and early adulthood, which turned into reverse phase for i think a few years. of course this meant that i was a bad person, trying too hard, and not trying hard enough [lazy]. misopathy.
I think there'll be a lot of individual variation (especially among PWME) but I'd like to focus in this thread on what scientific evidence (if any) there is for the claim, on a statistical scale. Is there anything in the scientific literature?
Some links you might like : Title : The 24-h growth hormone rhythm in men: sleep and circadian influences questioned. Link : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15339260 . This link contains many links within it on the subject of hormonal rhythms : https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/hormonal-rhythms . Link : https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ije/2015/591729/ Title : The Impact of Sleep and Circadian Disturbance on Hormones and Metabolism
I’m not sure about optimum bed time...this seems a bit flaky to me. Problem with sleep studies is there is a lot of poor science “pollution” from old behavioural studies and rubbish psychological mambo jumbo so it may have come from there? Perhaps she read it in a Desmond Morris book? The yellow blue light stimulation stuff has been pretty much accepted but apart from that I think a lot is unknown and we are still studying mice at the moment. I looked a while back and was surprised at the volume of shite out there. Although it doesn’t answer the question and a bit off topic but this seems interesting after an initial peruse https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04497-x And this https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/disrupted-sleep-wake-cycle-might-be-measure-preclinical-alzheimers
Thanks, Arnie - it basically says that if you're a shift worker and miss the opportunity for a big spike in growth hormone in your sleep, you catch up on it in the day (if I've understood that correctly).
Probably the best advice is to sleep at the timing which is best for you in a room as dark as possible (pitch black if possible)
The question for me, though, in this thread, is: What do we have scientific evidence for, from properly designed research?
I understand but thats going to be tricky if the data is from normal people and people without circadian abnormalities (if you have any)
