Is sleep before midnight the best!?

Sleep before midnight—a statement we hear time and again—is the best and most important sleep. Is that true, or is it just an old wives’ tale?

To answer this question, we need to know a little more about sleep.

During the night, people go through various sleep phases. The first three to four hours of sleep are—regardless of when you fall asleep—the most restorative, as this is when most deep sleep phases occur. Deep sleep is crucial for the body’s regeneration. During this time, heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure drop significantly.

So if someone goes to bed as early as 9:00 p.m., the hours leading up to midnight are definitely the most valuable hours of sleep for that person. Before televisions entered living rooms, it was common for people to already be in bed at that time, so the saying, “Sleep before midnight is the best,” was absolutely valid.

Meanwhile, however, bedtimes have shifted later, and for this reason, this statement is now only partially true. However, there is a concept related to midnight that is very much connected to good sleep. This is because every person has their very own biological midnight. And that occurs about 4 hours after falling asleep. So, if you regularly go to bed at 10 p.m., you experience biological midnight around 2 a.m. If you’re a baker, for example, and go to sleep as early as 8 p.m., you actually sleep best before midnight.