Waking up one hour earlier can lower a person’s chance of major depression by 23%, new research finds

A new genetic study published in the journal, JAMA Psychiatry, on May 26 found that waking up one hour earlier can lower a person’s chance of major depression by 23%. 

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard studied 840,000 people and found some of the best evidence yet that chronotype, or a person’s proclivity to sleep at a specific hour, influences depression risk. 

It’s also one of the first studies to measure how much, or how little, change is needed to have an impact on mental health. The results might have significant ramifications when individuals return to work and school remotely following the epidemic, a tendency that has pushed many to adjust to a later sleep pattern. 

“We have known for some time that there is a relationship between sleep timing and mood, but a question we often hear from clinicians is: How much earlier do we need to shift people to see a benefit?” said senior author Celine Vetter, assistant professor of integrative physiology at CU Boulder. “We found that even one-hour earlier sleep timing is associated with significantly lower risk of depression.”

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