Since society is built around a morning oriented schedule it stands to reason that late sleepers feel left behind during the day.

Overall, early risers are happier.

Scientists are not sure if the feelings of happiness are the result of rest, exposure to light or the body’s bio-chemical response to sleep.

By age 60, most people are morning types, the researchers found. Only about 7 percent of young adults are morning larks, but as the population ages, this switches — in the older years only about 7 percent of the population are still night owls.
“We found that older adults reported greater positive emotion than younger adults, and older adults were more likely to be morning-type people than younger adults,” Biss said. “The ‘morningness’ was associated with greater happiness emotions in both age groups.”

Getting cuddly can be good for your health.

Even when you consider tossing and turning, snoring and blanket hogs, the benefits of nighttime snuggling outweigh the annoyances.

While the science is in the early stages, one hypothesis suggests that by promoting feelings of safety and security, shared sleep in healthy relationships may lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. Sharing a bed may also reduce cytokines, involved in inflammation, and boost oxytocin, the so-called love hormone that is known to ease anxiety and is produced in the same part of the brain responsible for the sleep-wake cycle. So even though sharing a bed may make people move more, “the psychological benefits we get having closeness at night trump the objective costs of sleeping with a partner,” Dr. Troxel says.

Getting a good night’s sleep may be more than just refreshing.

Obesity genes that respond to lifestyle stimuli when you are fatigued get turned off when you get adequate sleep.

Being well rested helps your efforts to make healthy choices have a real impact on your weight.

“The less you sleep, the more important genetic factors are to how much you weigh,” says lead author Nathaniel F. Watson, M.D., co-director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Center, in Seattle. “The longer you sleep, the greater the influence of environmental factors like meal composition and timing.”
Previous research has found that too little sleep is associated with a higher BMI, but many of those studies haven’t been able to entirely rule out the possibility that genes, or complicating factors such as sleep disorders, are partly responsible for the link.

Should employers allow their employees to nap on the job?

Some say, yes!

There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that napping, that’s 20-30 minute cat naps, can increase overall productivity.

What would have been considered outrageous a decade ago is now a cutting edge workplace practice.

Office naptime is zonking workplaces across the country. OnSwipe, a software shop in Manhattan facilitates napping at an office “den,” as does Pontiflex, a mobile app ad start-up in Brooklyn; Jawa, a mobile app maker in Scottsdale, AZ; and 42 Inc., an information technology consultant in Berkeley, CA. Big-name players like Google and Ben & Jerry’s endorse napping. NASA has teamed up with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and 91 volunteers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to teach astronauts how to nap better during long missions. For some, it’s a company perk akin to gym membership, or free lunch.