TSMP: How Mornings Can Save Your Life

The scientific benefits of waking up, having dinner, finishing your last cocktail, and even getting medicine much earlier in the day

Photo by Kikki Starr on Unsplash

The Sunday Morning Post is back! This newsletter is mostly about current affairs. But my weeklyish weekend feature seeks instead to focus on breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and lessons from ancient history that defy the 24-hour news cycle. In today’s post, a personal finding leads to a deep rabbit hole on the science of chronotypes and circadian rhythms.

Life is about tradeoffs. I love wine and cocktails. I also love sleep. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become difficult, and sometimes impossible, to indulge in the former while preserving the latter.

I didn’t realize the severity of alcohol’s effect on my sleep until last year, when my wife convinced me to get an Oura Ring. I was initially skeptical. I didn’t want a gizmo on my skin passing quantitative judgment on my heart rate and middle-of-the-night restlessness. (I’m sufficiently judgmental of my insomnia without the quiet scolding of a digital device, thank you very much.) But I immediately learned something from my ring data. Each night that I had a glass of wine after 8pm, my sleep score plummeted. A cocktail after 10pm? I may as well have been hooked up to an IV drip of Brazilian espresso¹. But when I had the same glass of red while cooking dinner at 6pm, my sleep was serene and unaffected. I realized I could enjoy both my resveratrol and my REM. The solution was simple. Drink moderately, and drink early.

In the last few months—primed, perhaps, by my Oura Ring experience—I’ve come across more studies and meta-analyses that suggest it’s not just the glass of wine that adults should schedule earlier in the day. It’s practically everything, including waking up, eating dinner, even receiving medical treatments.

The scientific benefits of waking up earlier

Everybody has heard of early birds versus night owls. Our natural inclination to go to bed and wake up at certain times is sometimes referred to as a chronotype, and it’s almost certainly based in reality and influenced by genetics. But even night owls can suffer from what researchers call “social jet lag,” the many ways in which modern life disrupts our circadian rhythm by pushing our fall-asleep time too late in the evening.

"Eveningness, a preference for later sleep and rise times, has been associated with a number of negative outcomes in terms of both physical and mental health,” the British psychologist Ray Norbury wrote in a 2021 Nature paper. For example, he noted that “a large body of evidence links eveningness to Major Depressive Disorder.” In May 2021, an analysis published by JAMA Psychiatry of nearly 840,000 people of European descent found that getting up one hour earlier in the morning corresponded with a 23 percent decline in depression risk.

That’s an observational analysis, and there aren’t many big studies that randomly assign night owls to early wake-up groups. But the few such studies that exist show some promising results. A 2019 paper from British researchers found that getting self-described night owls to fall asleep two hours earlier—through fixed meal times and limited caffeine intake—had a "positive impact on mental health and performance." A 2012 study of young people in India saw similar results. Researchers randomly assigned people to wake up before 4:30AM “based on the traditional Indian astrological calculations,” while a control group was allowed to sleep in. After 20 days, the early risers showed “a significant improvement in verbal and memory tasks.

The upshot of these studies is not that night owls are a myth, but rather that people who believe they can and should stay up late are at risk of a “social jet lag” that misaligns their schedules with their bodies’ needs. Many people might be a little better off merely pretending they’re more early-birdish than they naturally feel.

The scientific benefits of eating earlier

The simplest rule of diet is the energy balance model of nutrition. When calories consumed exceed calories burned, weight rises; when calories burned exceed calories consumed, weight falls. But the EBM isn’t the only empirical truth about nutrition and health. The human body is no mere abacus. Food ingredients, genetics, and environmental pollutants all play a significant role in weight control.

Some studies have found that timing matters, too. Say you take two diners. Give them the same meal with the same number of calories. One eats at 5pm and the other eats at 9pm, and they both fall asleep at 10pm. Repeat the experiment over several weeks. Over time, science suggests that the early eater may have a metabolic edge with better weight control over time.

The evidence here is a bit more scattershot than on sleep, but it’s interesting enough to earn our attention. Several studies have showed that limiting meals to an early time-restricted window improved “insulin sensitivity, glycemic variability, blood pressure, and appetite.” People who try out continuous glucose monitors often see first-hand that their bodies can handle a hit of sugar at 10am even though the same hit would cause a blood-sugar spike at 10pm.

One randomized trial led of early time-restricting eating found that it was effective for losing weight (but not body fat). A British trial of 82 healthy women found that earlier evening meals resulted in “favourable changes in weight loss and plasma cardio-metabolic risk markers during a weight loss programme.” (British spellings preserved for adorableness.) Perhaps most memorably, a study of 1,195 people, 81 percent female, concluded that "each hour of delay in meal timing was associated with 2.2% higher long-term body weight." This effect was most pronounced in people with higher genetic risk for obesity.

Nutrition is an evidentiary snake pit, and most of the strongest claims in this space—say, that ultra processed foods are the devil—turn out to be super complicated when you subject them to rigorous analysis. I don’t want to add to the news-media tradition of over-simplifying diet science by telling you that 4pm dinners will turn you into a supermodel. But current evidence suggests that earlier eating aligns digestion with the body’s circadian rhythm in ways that bolster calorie burning, support insulin sensitivity, and even counter weight gain.

Get your medicine in the morning

Here’s where things get really interesting. The rule of “just about everything is better earlier” seems to apply to advanced medicine, as well.

In June, researchers from China presented evidence that cancer patients who received therapeutic infusions earlier in the day lived months longer than patients with later-day infusions. When I first saw this result bouncing around my little corner of nerd social media, I thought it sounded too weird to be true. But it turns out that another 2025 study, which followed 713 patients in France and China with advanced lung cancer, found that those who got drugs before 11:30AM lived more than a year longer than those who received the same treatment after 11:30AM. A 2024 Nature Reviews analysis synthesizing studies with more than 3,200 patients uncovered the same pattern. Patients who received their infusions earlier in the day had dramatically longer progression-free and overall survival—sometimes up to fourfold longer—than those treated late in the afternoon.

One possible explanation for the effectiveness of early dosing is that our immune functions are fully restored in the morning and are thus especially responsive to dosing. Perhaps our immune systems, like our metabolic systems, are simply more responsive early in the morning. We are rhythmic organisms, with rhythmic biological systems that are honed to rise and fall with certain cycles, including the rising and setting of the sun. Medicine might just work best when it works with our circadian rhythm rather than against it.

Exercise: The exception that proves the rule

It would be nice if every time I had an idea for an article, the scientific literature spontaneously aligned with the thesis to prove me 100 percent correct. Unfortunately, this never happens. Instead, I find that even my strongest theories have all sorts of caveats. And here is my caveat for doing stuff earlier: It’s not very clear that early morning workouts provide much physiological benefit, even though I’d argue that they do offer a certain psychological advantage.

Several studies have suggested that exercise capacity might be superior in the evening rather than in the morning hours. In one often cited paper, Weizmann Institute researchers investigated whether the time of day affected exercise performance and found “exercise performance is better in the evening than in the morning hours.” Still, middle-aged athletes tend to be high in “morningness,” as they typically schedule “relatively more training in the morning.” I often hear from friends that if they don’t schedule their workouts in the morning, they’ll never get around to it.

So, my synthesis of the literature and my life experience is something like this: Exercise isn’t like eating and sleeping, because you don’t actually have to do it. Fit people have to make exercise a habit. If your goal is performance, there’s some evidence that later training might be better. But if your goal is habit formation, scheduling the gym earlier in the day makes it more likely that you’ll actually go.

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I think it’s important to say that some health findings are high-certainty and universal. The polio vaccine is certainly effective for just about everybody. The science of “doing everything just a little bit earlier” is less certain and more heterogeneous. Different people with different genes in different environments seem have different chronotypes and might benefit from different schedules.

But this much seems true: Modern life is pulling our bodies toward a later schedule than our biology would prefer. Human evolution did its work in a world without fluorescent lights, OLED screens, 24-hour retail, or continuous streaming entertainment. We are dysevolved for this economy of consciousness, which pulls our waking hours into zones that strain our metabolic and immune systems. The scientists Evelyn B Parr, Leonie K Heilbronn, and John A Hawley put it elegantly in their paper “A Time to Eat and a Time to Exercise”:

Our prevailing modern lifestyle—round-the-clock access to energy-dense food, low levels of habitual physical activity accompanied by periods of prolonged sitting, and inadequate quality/quantity of sleep—interacts with underlying biology to create an environment in which circadian rhythms are disrupted, often resulting in a plethora of metabolic conditions.

Electric lighting, infinite streaming entertainment, and social media are modern inventions that seem to pull people away from their bodies’ natural preference for a slightly earlier schedule. But scientific knowledge, too, is a modern invention. If we used that knowledge to push back against the extreme eveningness of modernity, we might be able to eke out a bit more sleep and health from life. I miss staying up late and having a final cocktail at 10pm. But I can’t deny that, having learned what that last Negroni is doing to me, I just don’t go for that sort of thing anymore. Like I said: Life is about tradeoffs.

1. Alcohol gives and takes. This is true at the macro level: A night of heavy boozing can offer elation followed by nausea. And it’s true at the brain level. Alcohol is first a sedative and second a sleep disruptor. At a biochemical level, it constricts the brain’s chemical messengers for a few hours, which quiets the mind and makes it easy to zonk out. But, after a while, our chemical messaging functions rebound with a vengeance, causing middle-of-the-night restlessness. For this reason, both MD Anderson and the Cleveland Clinic suggest a three hour buffer between the last drink and bedtime to give our brains and bodies time to clear the rebound effect.