A Massive New Study of 20,000 Adults Says This Is What Happens When You Start Going to Bed Early

Forget the old adage that nothing good happens after midnight. I’ve had an awful lot of fun in the early morning hours.

It wasn’t just going out and partying in my younger years, either.

In fact, I’ve written before about the almost magical experience I once had when I put on an old army t-shirt with a big “USA” on the front for a middle-of-the-night run:

Like so much in life, however, there’s a time for that, and a time for other things.

Now, a big new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that, for adults anyway, there’s a lot to be gained by going to bed early.

Researchers analyzed the sleep and exercise habits of 19,963 adults who agreed to wear wrist-borne biomedical devices to track their activity. The data amounted to a whopping 5,995,080 “person-nights,” and allowed them to figure out if habitually early bedtimes correlated with other habits.