LegalReader.com  ·  Legal News, Analysis, & Commentary

Health & Medicine

Wake Up Early or Stay Up Late: Which is Better?


— November 5, 2020

The best quality sleep mainly includes three aspects, namely adequate sleep time, good work and rest habits, and good sleep quality.


Since the improvement of material life, everybody has a mobile phone and various electronic products at home, such as televisions, computers, game consoles, projectors, etc. These can make people fall into the electronic world and not help themselves out of it. So, staying up late has become the norm. Others are due to poor sleep quality and frequent staying up late; due to work requirements. They need to go to night shifts and so on. The daily sleep time is difficult to meet the health standard for 7-9 hours.

In the common impression of everyone, compared with staying up late, getting up early is healthier and the late bedtime is more harmful. 

In fact, in a strict sense, sleeping late is not necessarily bad, as long as you can sleep within a reasonable range of sleep time. For example, if you fall asleep at midnight and wake up at 7-9 o’clock, you will sleep regularly every day. If your sleep quality is good, there will be no problems. 

What is staying up late?

Staying up late is not limited to the time to fall asleep. It mainly refers to insufficient sleep time, irregular sleep, and staying up all night. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that this way of staying up late will lose liver blood, which is detrimental to health.

According to related research, when people stay up all night, the body secretes cortisol. It will consume collagen, the skin loses its elasticity, luster. It is the ghost of staying up late and the adverse reaction caused by excessive cortisol secretion.

Also, the harm caused by staying up late may lead to weakened immunity, negative emotions, and decreased brain responsiveness. In severe cases, current research shows that staying up late involves almost all cancers, including common cancers such as lung cancer, liver cancer, gastric cancer , ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, and so on.

Getting up early is not always beneficial, though

Morning jogs before preparing to go to work is a good routine for an early riser; image by Skeeze, via Pixabay.com.
Morning jogs before preparing to go to work is a good routine for an early riser; image by Skeeze, via Pixabay.com.

In a Harvard University survey, it was found that there is a kind of early waking that is no less harmful than staying up late. This kind of early waking refers to people who lack sleep, not those who wake early for a calisthenics workout. Through the analysis of investigators, people who wake up early but lack sufficient sleep can also experience harmful effects to their health, especially in terms of cognition.

Also, we also need to pay attention to people who do not sleep well. Simply put, if you fall asleep very early, but the quality of sleep is very low, you may wake up many times at night and not enter deep sleep so the body can rest better. In the end, the mental state will decline the next day, and even face the same harm as staying up late.

Therefore, it is recommended that everyone does not sleep with the wrong concept. The best quality sleep mainly includes three aspects, namely adequate sleep time, good work and rest habits, and good sleep quality. You can meet these every day, so don’t worry.

Join the conversation!