Want to Feel Better and Be More Mindful? Neuroscience Says This Habit Might Be Holding You Back (2025)

• Elon Musk described himself as “fairly nocturnal” in 2022, going to bed around 3 a.m. and getting up at 9 a.m. His recent experience with DOGE and posting on X in the middle of the night seem to back that up.
• President Donald Trump says he gets about four to five hours of sleep per night. “I don’t sleep much,” he said in a February interview. “A lot of people that love what they are doing don’t sleep much, I find. And so far it’s been OK.”
• Throughout history, we’ve seen one night owl after another say it’s just how they’re built: Winston Churchill, Toni Morrison, Prince, and more modern entrepreneurs than you could count.

But what if I were to tell you that neuroscience suggests that people who go to bed late are more likely to suffer from depression, act with less mindfulness, and even abuse alcohol at much higher rates than their early-rising, better-slept peers?

What happens to night owls?

Writing in the journal PLOS One, neuroscience lecturer Simon Evans of the University of Surrey in the U.K., whose primary research interest is “the use of brain imaging techniques to investigate factors affecting cognitive change across the lifespan,” said he and colleagues studied the sleep habits of 546 university students.

Sure enough, they found a correlation between people with “evening chronotypes” – basically, night owls – and lower sleep quality, higher levels of depression, higher alcohol use, and lower mindfulness.

The study sample was limited to college-age students. But reseachers say that’s a demographic that needs the study – and the results seem likely to be representative of other ages and walks of life.

“With many young adults experiencing poor mental health,” Evans and his colleagues wrote, “these study findings are particularly important. Many young adults tend to stay up late and the results point to how interventions could be implemented to reduce their risk of depression.”

The flipside

Let’s admit something crucial: Both sides of the coin could be true:

• It could be 100 percent true that night owls are more prone to the kinds of negative mental health conditions that Evans and his colleagues identify.
• It could also be true that some people who legitimately have evening chronotypes really do function better in the middle of the night – whether it’s because they more easily focus at that time, or perhaps because there are fewer distractions in the world at that time of night.

The good news is that other research suggests that evening chronotype people have the ability to overcome their predilection for being night owls.

Last year, Stanford University researchers surveyed 73,880 adults to determine whether people’s chronotypes (evening or morning) corresponded with when they actually slept.

The overall result: Much like the Evans study, night owls had more mental health challenges.

But, they found that “evening types” who made themselves go to bed early wound up with the second-best mental health of any group – second only to the “morning people” who wanted to go to bed early anyway.

Healthy habits

“The worst-case scenario is definitely the late-night people staying up late,” the leader of that study said, adding: “I thought, let’s try to disprove it, because this doesn’t make any sense. We spent six months trying to disprove it, and we couldn’t.”

Maybe the key is to be intentional and in control – allowing yourself the freedom to work late at night if that’s your preference when you can, but keeping track of what you do with the time and how it affects you.

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