We aren’t all morning people. But maybe we should be, as recent research reveals that people tend to have better mental health and well-being scores in the morning than at night.
“There is a clear time-of-day pattern in self-reported mental health and well-being,” the research study states, published in BMJ Mental Health today. “There is also an association with day of the week and season, with particularly strong evidence for better mental health and well-being in the summer.”
Starting Off Strong
Research shows that mental health and well-being are far from stagnant, seeing their fair share of shifts over time. Some studies track these changes through lives. Others, over a period of years or a year. Yet there aren’t many studies that trace mental health and well-being diurnally, during the shortened timescale of the day.
“Mood is known to change over seasons of the year, days of the week, and even over the course of the day,” the study stated. “But although broader mental health and well-being also vary over months and weeks, it is unclear whether there are diurnal changes in how people experience and report their mental health.”
To determine whether the time of day predicts patterns in mental health and well-being, the authors of the recent research turned to survey results from the University College London COVID-19 Social Study. Including measures for symptoms of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, and assessing the participants’ sense of happiness as well as their sense of life as satisfying and worthwhile, the survey results reveal that people tend to feel their best in the morning and their worst at night.
“Generally,” the study stated, “things do seem better in the morning.”
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Determining Daily Patterns
Conducted from March 2020 to March 2022, the COVID-19 Social Study tracked mental health and well-being information for thousands of participants through a combination of self-assessments and surveys. In total, complete information was compiled for almost 50,000 people.
Taken at any time from 6:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m., the surveys asked participants how happy they felt in the past week, for instance, and recorded how satisfying and worthwhile they felt their life had been.
Using timestamps to tie the participants’ responses to specific times of the day, the study authors found that mental health and well-being tends to start strong, with people reporting lower levels of loneliness and of depression and anxiety symptoms and higher senses of happiness, life satisfaction, and life worth in the morning than at night.
These time-of day patterns applied to any season, though the differences between participants’ best mental health and worst mental health were more dramatic during the weekends than during the weekdays.
Assessing trends associated with the day of the week and the season, too, the study found that the participants’ sense of happiness, life satisfaction, and life worth were also better on Mondays and Fridays than on Sundays, and better in summers than in winters. Symptoms of depression and anxiety were also improved in the summer, as were levels of loneliness.
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A Circadian Connection?
According to a press release, the study results are not causal, and cannot reveal the source of these trends. That said, it’s possible that they connect to our circadian rhythms and their timely release of cortisol, a hormone that regulates our response to stress.
“Physiological processes are known to change across the day,” the study stated. “Cortisol peaks shortly after waking and reaches its lowest levels around bedtime.”
Other factors could connect to these trends too, as circadian rhythms do not differ between weekends and weekdays, though daily trends in mental health and well-being do.
“Given there is little evidence that physiological processes differ across different days of the week, differences might be related to other factors,” the study stated. “This could include contextual factors and sequence of daily activities, which are likely to be different between weekends and weekdays.”
Ultimately, the researchers say that their results should inform mental health treatments and therapies in the future. “These factors should also be considered for the design and delivery of interventions,” the study stated, “as well as the planning and provision of public health services.”
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Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
