Could your weekend lie in KILL you? Social jet lag 'increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease'
- 'Social jet lag' entails different sleep schedules for workdays and days off
- A new study says social jet lag is more harmful than actual jet lag
- A work-based sleep pattern increases your risk diabetes and heart disease
- Your sleep is constantly changing - causing circadian misalignment
- Regular jet lag from travel allows you to adjust to a new pattern though
Many of us struggle to wake up early on workdays.
So when the weekend rolls around, we tend to reward ourselves with a couple extra hours of sleep.
While extra rest feels like a luxury, experts warn that it may be detrimental to our health.
A disrupted sleep schedule can increase your risk of diabetes and heart disease, a new study revealed.
Having one sleep schedule on workdays and another on off days is known as ‘social jet lag'.
Just as cross-continental flights can disrupt circadian rhythms by sending passengers abruptly across several time zones, social jet lag wreaks havoc with the body’s biological clock.
Waking up early on workdays - only to sleep in on your days off - is known as 'social jet lag' because it wreaks havoc with your body's biological clock. It also increases your risk of diabetes and heart disease
Dr Patricia Wong of the University of Pittsburgh, lead author of the study, told Reuters: ‘Social jet lag is a habitual form of circadian misalignment, when individuals have to essentially sleep and wake at times that are out of sync from their internal, biological clock and shift back and forth in their sleep schedules due to social obligations.’
Dr Wong and her colleagues looked at a group of around 450 middle-aged adults.
The researchers found that people with the biggest shift in sleep routines between workdays and days off were more likely to have health problems that are risk factors for diabetes and heart disease.
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The symptoms included extra girth around the midsection and higher levels of sugars and fats in the blood.
The participants with ‘social jet lag’ also had low levels of high density lipoprotein cholesterol – which is the ‘good kind’ of cholesterol that works to prevent damage to blood vessels.
The results didn’t definitively prove that social jet lag causes diabetes or heart disease.
However, it does suggest that the connection needs to be examined further, Dr Wong said.
The study participants were a group of adults aged 30 to 54 years, who worked at lest 25 hours a week outside the home.
Researchers excluded people who had a whole host of medical conditions that could contribute to risk factors to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
They also excluded shift workers.
The participants were asked to wear devices to track their activity and sleep around the clock for seven days.
The devices recorded sleep duration, in addition to the midpoint of total sleeping time for each day – including both workdays and off days.
The participants who were typically awake later at night – known as an evening chronotype – were more likely to have social jet lag.
Social jet lag is worse for the body than regular jet lag, which allows people to settle into a routine, while social jet lag is defined as a constantly-changing routine
Those same people also had lower HDL cholesterol.
The researchers lacked data to see if the people with more pronounced social jet lag or evening chronotypes had different circadian rhythms than others.
They also did not monitor what people ate based on time of day – which can influence many cardiometabolic risk factors.
Dr Till Ronneberg, a psychology researcher at the University of Munich in Germany, wasn’t involved in the study.
He said the study is merely the latest evidence to suggest that social jet lag is even more harmful than ordinary jet lag.
That’s because social jet lag involves people shifting in and out of different routines based on work schedules, while ordinary jet lag allows people to adjust to and stick with a new routine.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
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