Good morning? Study finds better mental health and well-being early in the day. Here’s why.

Good morning? Study finds better mental health and well-being early in the day. Here's why.

We’ve all heard of seasonal affective disorder — the phenomenon that explains why so many people feel more depressed during the winter. But can our mental health fluctuate at different times of the day, too?

As it turns out, your mom was right when she said that everything would look brighter in the morning. A new study published in the BMJ Mental Health journal reveals that people tend to have a brighter, more optimistic outlook in the morning, with mental health and well-being at their lowest around midnight.

Here’s what the study found

The observational study analyzed self-reported data on mental health and well-being from the University College London COVID-19 Social Study, which began in March 2020, was regularly monitored until November 2021, then had additional monitoring up to March 2022. Using data from 49,218 adults, researchers looked at whether time of day, season or year was associated with variations in mental health (i.e., depressive and/or anxiety symptoms), life satisfaction, a sense of life being worthwhile and loneliness. They found that:

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  • People generally feel in the best frame of mind in the morning, and feel the worst around midnight.

  • There’s “some inconsistent evidence” that the day of the week is associated with mental health and well-being.

  • Mental health is overall best in the summer. Depressive and anxiety symptoms and feelings of loneliness are highest, and happiness levels and life satisfaction levels are lowest in the winter.

The study authors write that the changes in mental health and well-being throughout the day could be explained by the physiological changes associated with the body’s biological clock — for example, cortisol peaking shortly after waking and reaching its lowest levels at night.

“We repeatedly saw mornings align with better mental health and well-being, and midnight with the lowest — a pattern that held even when accounting for variations in individual characteristics,” Feifei Bu, lead author of the study and a research fellow at University College London, tells Yahoo Life.

While Bu says the COVID-19 pandemic “undoubtedly shaped many aspects of daily life, and its toll on mental health is well-documented,” those conditions were carefully factored into the analysis of the data.

“It is reassuring that our findings match pre-pandemic studies on mood cycles,” she says. “This suggests that the time-of-day association may be more than just a special case of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

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