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• Posted January 28, 2026

Night Owls Have Worse Heart Health, Study Finds

Do you prefer to stay up late, living it up through the night while everyone else is snoozing away?

You might be doing your heart health a disservice, a new study says.

Middle-aged and older night owls appear to have worse heart health, likely due to unhealthy lifestyle choices, researchers reported today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

“Evening people may be more likely to have behaviors that can affect cardiovascular health, such as poorer diet quality, smoking and inadequate or irregular sleep,” lead investigator Sina Kianersi said in a news release. He’s a research fellow in sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Night owls were 79% more likely to have a poor overall heart health score, compared to people with average sleeping patterns, researchers found. In this case, average means folks don’t usually stay up late or get up very early. 

As a result, night owls had a 16% higher risk of heart attack or stroke during about 14 years of follow up, researchers said.

By contrast, early birds were 5% less likely to have a low heart health score compared to the rest, researchers found.

These results were found among more than 300,000 people with an average age of 57 participating in the UK Biobank, a long-term health study in the United Kingdom.

Of those people, about 8% said they were definitely evening people, with a bedtime that often occurred past midnight.

Another 24% were early birds, with bedtimes earlier in the evening, and 67% fell somewhere between those two extremes.

“‘Evening people’ often experience circadian misalignment, meaning their internal body clock may not match the natural day-to-night light cycle or their typical daily schedules,” Kianersi said.

Results showed that being a night owl tended to affect women’s heart health scores more than men’s.

About 75% of a night owl’s increased risk was explained by lifestyle habits, the study found.

The news isn’t all bad, however.

Because the risk is largely due to bad choices, night owls aren’t doomed to poor heart health, said Kristen Knutson, volunteer chair of an American Heart Association statement on circadian patterns and heart health. She was not involved in the study.

“These findings show that the higher heart disease risks among evening types are partly due to modifiable behaviors such as smoking and sleep. Therefore, evening types have options to improve their cardiovascular health,” she said in a news release.

“Evening types aren’t inherently less healthy, but they face challenges that make it particularly important for them to maintain a healthy lifestyle,” concluded Knutson, an associate professor of neurology and preventive medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

More information

The American Heart Association has more on heart-healthy lifestyle choices.

SOURCE: American Heart Association, news release, Jan. 28, 2026