Go to bed!

'This is a great decision I'm making at 3 o'clock in the morning!'

I'm proud of myself because I began writing this newsletter at about 10:30 a.m.

That's in contrast to how I sometimes wind up working (or at least did, before I made a conscious effort to change) which often involved not wrapping up until the early morning hours.

I always had a good reason or an excuse, but it still never felt like the healthiest choice. Now, there's yet another new scientific study that backs that up.

Writing in the journal Psychiatry Research, Stanford University researchers said they surveyed 73,880 adults as part of a study about whether people's chronotypes, which basically means their preferred sleep timing, correlated with their actual sleep timing.

They concluded that it didn't matter whether the time people felt they naturally wanted to sleep corresponded to when they actually did.

Instead, regardless of preference, people who stayed up late at night had higher rates of behavioral and mental disorders than those who did not.

"We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it's being up late that is not good for your mental health," said senior author Jamie Zeitzer, a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "The big unknown is why."

This all came as a surprise to the researchers, whose previous research suggested that women who were battling cancer had longer lifespans if they slept according to their chronotypes.

For the more recent study, researchers asked study participants, who were generally either middle-aged or older adults in the United Kingdom, to describe themselves as either morning types (19,065), evening types (6,844), or else somewhere in the middle (47,979).

They were provided with accelerometers to track their activity, and also provided access to their health records, so researchers could track whether they'd been diagnosed with behavioral or mental disorders.

Sure enough, and again to the researchers' surprise, the results looked like this:

• People who described themselves as morning types, and who went to bed early and rose with the sun had the best mental health.

• People who described themselves as evening types but who nevertheless went to bed early had the second-best mental health.

• People who described themselves as morning types but who found themselves going to bed late "suffered, but not too much," and

• People who described themselves as evening types and who went to bed late had by far the worst outcome, with between a 20 and 40 percent likelihood of having been diagnosed with a behavioral or mental health disorder.

"The worst-case scenario is definitely the late-night people staying up late," Ziegler said, adding: "I thought, let's try to disprove it, because this doesn't make any sense. We spent six months trying to disprove it, and we couldn't."

Now, we have to interject here -- as Zeitzer and the Stanford team did -- to point out that the correlation in this study between night owl behavior and mental or behavioral health issues doesn't necessarily mean that the practice of being a night owl actually causes these issues. 

They did test whether it might be the other way around -- mental or behavioral health issues actually causing night owl behavior. But what they found by working with a subset of the 73,880 study participants didn't support that idea.

I’ll let Zeitzer have the last word, because I like the way he put it:

"If I had to hazard a guess, morning people who are up late are quite cognizant of the fact that their brain isn't working quite right.

So, they may put off making bad decisions.

Meanwhile, the evening person who is up late thinks, 'I'm feeling great. This is a great decision I'm making at 3 o'clock in the morning.'"

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7 other things …

• President Biden addressed the nation for the first time on Wednesday since bowing out of the 2024 election on Sunday, saying he is passing the torch to "a new generation" while again throwing his support behind Vice President Harris in her campaign to secure the Democratic Party's nomination. The president said he looks forward to the work before him in his final six months in office, including pushing for Supreme Court reforms. (Fox News)

• New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez will resign his office on Aug. 20 following the conviction in his federal corruption trial, according to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. Why wait until next month? Menendez says it's to do things like, "give time for my staff to transition to other possibilities." (ABC News)

• On Sunday, Earth saw its warmest day on record globally since at least 1940, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe. Lots of reports say this was the hottest day in history, or in thousands of years -- but without spending 10 paragraphs on it here, let's just say that's an educated guess. (Axios)

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday delivered an impassioned speech to Congress, taking on protesters inside the House chamber and thousands gathered outside the Capitol. (NBC News)

• Tennis star Coco Gauff will be the female flag bearer for the United States at this week's Olympic opening ceremony in Paris, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee announced Wednesday. The 20-year-old Gauff will join basketball great LeBron James in carrying the American flag. Both Gauff and James were chosen by a vote of their fellow competitors on Team USA. (NPR)

• Two people were thrown into the ocean after a humpback whale landed on their fishing boat off the New Hampshire coast on Tuesday morning, and the entire incident was caught on a video that later went viral. "We didn't see him for a couple of minutes, and then the next thing we knew, he popped up and landed right on the transom of the boat," said Gregg Paquette of Groveland, who was aboard the fishing boat with Ryland Kenney of Dover, New Hampshire. (WCVB Boston)

• Developers are thinking small when it comes to studio apartments. The average size of studio units has shrunk by 54 square feet to 445 square feet since 2014, making them 10% smaller today than they were a decade ago, according to a new report from RentCafe. “I love my little studio,” said a woman liiving in Chicago. “But gosh, I need more space to live and cook.” (WSJ)

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Thanks for reading. Photo credit: Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.