Recently, all these articles popped up about the ideal bedtime.
Spoiler alert: it’s 10-11pm.
Go to sleep earlier: more cardiovascular disease (well, only for some of the population). Go to sleep later: more cardiovascular disease (somewhat more pronounced).
It’s not causal (that is, we can’t conclude that a 10-11pm bedtime actually lowers the rates of cardiovascular disease) because the authors use observational data. People were not told to go to sleep at a particular time. They simply wore accelerometers that recorded their activity, including sleep. Unless they didn’t wear them enough, in which case they were excluded.
It might not actually apply to everyone in the world (!), because all the people in this study were in England. Oh, and they were also mostly from particular demographic groups (their ages, races, and income levels certainly don’t apply to everyone).
Plus, people who are able to consistently go to bed at 10-11pm probably are living lives that make that bedtime available, which says something about the nature of their jobs and homes and a whole host of things beyond just their bedtimes that might affect the eventual incidence of cardiovascular disease.
And again: it wasn’t an experiment. (To their credit, the authors state outright that this study doesn’t imply changing your bedtime will make you healthier.) But it’s normal for news publications to report correlation as if it’s causation.
What I don’t get is this:
These articles were published within days of the end of Daylight Saving Time in the UK, Canada, and the US. And no article I came across mentioned this delicious irony.
What do we do with an ideal bedtime when time itself is a construct?
Or is no one else picking up on this a sign that I’m the confused one? What if we adjust so perfectly to time changes that 10-11pm really is the Magical Bedtime that Will Solve Everyone’s Problems no matter who they are, what they do, where they are, or what time of year it is?
Is everyone else missing something or are you? Comment below and let me know about your favorite moment of complete bewilderment.
This Glass Has Water 