It might be time to go to bed.
Did you ever wonder why you are crankier when you didn’t sleep well through the night? A new study might have the answer. The first-of-its-kind study from American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and published in the journal Sleep, finds new links between sleep duration and depression.
“We were surprised that the heritability of depressive symptoms in twins with very short sleep was nearly twice the heritability in twins sleeping normal amounts of time,” said principal investigator Dr. Nathaniel Watson, associate professor of neurology and co-director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Center.
The study says that people who sleep significantly more or less than 7-8.9 hours per night increase their risk of feeling depressed.
The study, however, doesn’t give you the excuse to sleep all day.
“Both short and excessively long sleep durations appear to activate genes related to depressive symptoms,” Watson added.
