🦉 Night owls, brace yourselves. A study by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that following your natural inclination to stay awake until the early morning hours is a bad choice for your mental health.⁠ ⁠ In a survey of nearly 75,000 adults, researchers compared the participants' preferred sleep timing, known as chronotype, with their actual sleep behavior. They determined that regardless of one's preferred bedtime, everyone benefits from turning in early. Morning larks and night owls alike tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late.⁠ ⁠ The study, published in Psychiatry Research, recommends lights out by 1 a.m.⁠ ⁠ "We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it's being up late that is not good for your mental health," said Jamie Zeitzer, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the senior author of the study. "The big unknown is why."⁠ ⁠ Renske Lok, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in psy...