Sleeping doesn’t count as cardio, but it is good for your heart.
And the time you conk out each night could be the difference between a high and a low risk of heart attack or stroke.
Finnish researchers studying bedtime habits have found that drifting off to dreamland at the same time each night can reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events and disease — even if the quality and duration of sleep isn’t quite up to snuff.
With millions worldwide affected by heart disease, the No. 1 cause of death among adults, there’s a bottomless demand for simple and effective lifestyle tweaks that can decrease a person’s odds of a major cardiac event.
Researchers for this study recorded the sleeping patterns of over 3,000 middle-aged Finnish adults for close to 10 years using wearable devices that track sleep and other biomarkers.
The authors found that the degree of regularity of three major factors — bedtime, wake-up time and sleep midpoint, or the clock time halfway between falling asleep and waking up — could predict heart problems down the line.
For participants whose average sleep durations were less than eight hours, irregular bedtimes and variable sleep midpoints represented a “significant risk factor” for major cardiac events.
The findings showed, however, that getting more than eight hours of sleep per night was a cushion against heart issues, regardless of bedtime and sleep midpoint.
But sleep duration is a fine balance to strike, given that other studies have shown how too much sleep can contribute to metabolic issues like diabetes.
Researcher Laura Nauha, a lead author of the Finnish study, told Science Alert that while previous studies have “linked irregular sleep patterns to heart health risks,” this paper is the first to look “separately at variability in bedtime, wake-up time and the midpoint of the sleep period — and their independent associations with major cardiac events.”
She added that her team’s findings “suggest that the regularity of bedtime, in particular, may be important for heart health” because “it reflects the rhythms of everyday life — and how much they fluctuate.”
In general, the body’s 24-hour circadian rhythm is emerging as a powerful tool for hormone regulation and protection against everything from metabolic conditions to dementia and now heart disease.
Getting enough sleep can even help to optimize sperm.
This latest research supports the idea that our body’s biological clock keeps our internal systems in a delicate balance — and that disruptions to the rhythm can have far-reaching consequences.
When it comes to heart health, the authors of this paper posit that fluctuating bedtimes throw the circadian rhythm off balance, preventing the heart from achieving ideal recovery time overnight.
Another potential connection between sleep and heart health? Chronic stress.
Lifestyle factors that are bad for the heart are also bad for sleep — like an extreme workload, mental health burdens and general burnout. All simultaneously influence heart health and sleep quality, duration and regularity for the worse.
Interestingly, wake-up time didn’t appear to have much of an impact according to this research.
But other studies suggest that how we wake up — for example, certain harsh alarm tones spike blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol — can affect not just our mood but our heart health and stress levels over time.
The good news? You might be so exhausted from prepping and optimizing your sleep routine that you’ll pass out the second your head hits the pillow.
