Lark or owl? How your sleep personality could ‘put you at risk of dying young’
MORNING larks live longer because they drink and smoke less, a study found.
Past research suggests night owls are on average more intelligent and have more money – but die younger.
Experts at the University of Helsinki studied nearly 23,000 twins over 37 years and found this is because they tend to booze more and smoke more cigarettes.
The time people slept did not directly change their death risk but evening people led riskier lives.
They were nine per cent more likely than morning folk to have died during the study between 1981 and 2018.
Dr Christer Hublin, from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki, said: “The increased risk of mortality associated with being a clearly ‘evening’ person appears to be mainly accounted for by a larger consumption of tobacco and alcohol.
“This is compared to those who are clearly ‘morning’ people.”
Smoking causes more than a dozen types of cancer and drinking too much also raises cancer risk as well as damaging the liver and brain.
Finns in the study were 29.5 per cent morning people and 9.9 per cent evening people, with the remaining 61 per cent somewhere in the middle.
Two thirds of the evening people were smokers or ex-smokers, compared to less than half of early risers.
And just 22 per cent of night owls never drank alcohol, compared to 33 per cent of morning people.
Writing in the journal Chronobiology International, Dr Hublin said: “Compared to morning types, night owls were younger and drank or smoked more.
“Definite evening types were also less likely to report getting eight hours’ sleep.”
“Given the risk was primarily smoking and alcohol, among the non-smokers who were, at most, light drinkers, we saw no association of chronotype with early death.”