At what time is considered staying up late?

After every holiday, some students with poor self-discipline, after feeling the joy of not having to get up early for work or school, go to bed later and later, and get up later and later, falling into a vicious circle.

While the friends blame themselves for staying up late and causing baldness, they also enjoy playing games and watching TV series all night long. After the happy time is over, they will set a flag that "if I stay up late again, I will be a pig."

But when it comes to staying up late, what time should you go to bed before you can be considered staying up late?

In fact, due to individual differences, there is no standard definition of what time to go to bed and stay up late. 23:00 a.m. is not an absolute red line. Some people are used to going to bed at 2 a.m. and getting up at 10 a.m. Some people are used to going to bed at 10 p.m. and getting up at 6 a.m., but none of these are considered staying up late.

The so-called staying up late actually refers to irregular sleep cycles and "not getting enough sleep". (The normal sleep time for people is 7-8 hours)

No matter what time you go to bed, as long as you maintain a fixed sleep cycle and a relatively stable sleep duration, it does not count as staying up late.

For example, if you always go to bed at 10 o'clock, but one day you go to bed at 12 o'clock, you have an irregular schedule, which means you are staying up late.

Or maybe you always go to bed at 2 a.m. and have to get up at 7 a.m., which means you are not getting enough sleep and it is definitely considered staying up late.

But if you can get up at 10 am and be clear-headed and energetic, then going to bed at 2 am is not considered staying up late. This is a sleep phase delay: that is, the entire sleep cycle (start to end) is delayed.

But there is a group of people around us who, although they have regular sleeping hours, only need to sleep 4-5 hours a day and they will not feel sleepy during the day.

This is because they have mysterious genes in their bodies that can reduce sleep time - DEC2 gene and ADRB1 gene. If these two genes mutate, they can significantly reduce sleep time.

As early as 2009, scientists discovered that mutations in the DEC2 gene can shorten sleep duration. In the mutated DEC2 gene protein, the protein expressed by amino acids is a type of transcriptional repressor that can in turn inhibit the core regulation of the biological clock.

The ADRB1 gene was first discovered in a family of six. All members of the family had a cytosine replaced by guanine in the ADRB1 gene located on the short arm of chromosome 10, which resulted in an amino acid being replaced by alanine instead of valine in the corresponding protein. This mutation is very rare, with only four people per 100,000 carrying it.

If you have one of these two "staying up late genes", you only need to maintain a fixed "staying up late time", and you can feel full even if you go to bed very late and get up in the morning. Anyway, I am quite envious. I feel that they have a few more hours of sleep than me every day.

For those of us who don’t have these gene mutations, it’s better to go to bed early and get up early and develop good habits.

Although regular and adequate sleep is not called staying up late, it does not mean that staying up late for a long time has no effect on the body. Because the secretion of melatonin, which can improve sleep quality, has a diurnal pattern, usually reaching its peak at 2-3 am, and will stop immediately in a bright environment.

If you work night shifts and are forced to sleep during the day, your sleep will be affected because your body can still feel the light, temperature, and humidity while sleeping. Therefore, you should try to keep the sleeping environment dark and warm.

If you keep delaying going to bed because of a momentary indulgence, even if you can make up for the sleep hours during the day, it is still not recommended to do so.

Because the more joyful it is to stay up late, the more painful it is to adjust your work and rest schedule!