A study reveals that people in the west of every time zone sleep less, earn less and are sicker

A new study suggests that the sleep time of one night may depend on where you live in your time zone.

And this, in turn, can help shape your overall health.

People who live on the wrong side of a time zone see more sun later in the evening, go to bed later, sleep less and may end up with more health problems (and money).

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Universita della Svizzera in Italy found that people living on the edge of a time zone where the sun was setting out posed the greatest risk of cancer. bad, obesity, heart attack and diabetes.

People living in the west of each time zone go to bed later (dark blue), sleep less, earn less money and suffer from more illnesses on average, as indicated by a map. the new study.

The public health and sleep experts have sounded the alarm by claiming that the United States – and many countries around the world – are facing an epidemic of insomnia.

And being under-sleeping is a known risk factor for health problems.

Even small changes such as the summer time are badociated with higher rates of heart attacks.

Similarly, we know that bad cancer rates among women are higher among women who work in shifts.

Irregular work schedules disrupt the circadian rhythms that dictate our biological clocks and contribute to fluctuations in our hormones.

But the new study, published in the Journal of Health Economics, suggests that smaller differences in our days and schedules can affect our sleep schedules and health outcomes.

As you head west, the sun sets more and more late in the day and even later in the time zone.

Thus, in the same time zone, the sun goes down more than an hour earlier in the east than in the west.

Sleep experts say that the constant presence of artificial light has made sleep a lot more difficult than before.

Even with all this extra light pollution, the presence of the sun in the sky continues to draw us to waking or sleeping.

The sun sets later on the west side of each time zone (darker blues), as shown in a map of the new study.

The light triggers a chemical that goes into the brain and tells us what time it is and what it is supposed to do – which, in the presence of light, is waking up.

As long as the brain component of the biological clock, called hypothalamus, thinks it's daylight, it will ask the endocrine to hold melatonin, the hormone that helps trigger sleep.

So, the more the sun rises to start this chain of events, the longer we will stay up.

Even though modern life did not require that we get up early for work, school and our other day responsibilities, once the sun is up, the whole waking system is restarted.

The new study showed how accurate the watch movement was and how important its effects could be.

The researchers compared data on daylight hours per day in each of the four time zones in the United States at bedtime on average among residents of each county.

The average bedtime per county varied only about 20 minutes, ranging from 23:09 to 23:30.

But even this variation adds up quickly. If you fall at the end of the bedtime spectrum, but get up at the same time (on average) as everyone else, you lose 113 hours of sleep a year.

This variation was almost strangely aligned with the shift in sunset times from east to west.

And another badessment has confirmed what sleep scientists have been saying for a long time about the negative effects of reduced sleep on health and the economy.

In countries where sunsets and sunsets are late, more residents have slept an average of six hours or less, and are more likely to have a luxurious and full sleep.

In these low-light areas, obesity was 21% more common and people 11% more likely to be overweight.

These combined risk factors have also added to higher rates of poorer health outcomes.

Heart attacks, diabetes, and bad cancer were also more common west of time zones.

These under-sleeping areas have even been harder hit financially: wages are about 3% lower than those in zones is time zones.

As a side note – or perhaps a consolation for Western sans-doubts without sleep – the study's authors discovered that there could be environmental and biological underpinnings to the notion of "working hard , play hard.

"People can benefit more from enjoying their leisure time with more natural light in the evening," they wrote.

The question of whether this distinction of quality of life is worth the loss of salary, weight gain and illness was not addressed in the paper.

Instead, the authors encouraged people living on the wrong side of their time zone to try to offset their postal codes with social sleep-friendly schedules.