Dear Stoics,
Have you ever heard of social jetlag? Sounds a bit dramatic, like your social life gives you some kind of a timezone-changing hangover that you need to sleep off. The name is a bit misleading, but the thing itself is very real, and it can mess with your health more than you think. Let us explain.
Is a weekend night out like flying over the Atlantic?
Real jetlag happens when you cross time zones, and your body clock is still set to wherever you travelled from. Social jetlag is what happens when you get that same disoriented, out-of-sync feeling without even leaving your house. German scientist Till Roenneberg and his colleagues coined the term while studying how our sleep schedules and quality shift between weekdays and weekends. The mechanism is simple: it happens when there’s a mismatch between what your body wants, based on its internal biological clock, and what your life demands from you in terms of work, school, family, and your weekend fun nights out.
But how is it measured? The social jetlag is the gap between your midpoint sleep on weeknights and your midpoint sleep on weekends (midpoint sleep means the halfway point between when you fall asleep and when you wake up). So if you’re out until 3 am on Saturday and sleeping in until noon the next day, but during the week you’re asleep by midnight and up by 7, that gap between the two rhythms is your social jetlag.
What causes it, exactly? Part of it comes down to your chronotype, whether you’re wired to be more of an early bird or a night owl, and part of it is just life pulling you in a different direction than your body wants to go. And it’s not a surprise that your body usually wants to go to bed.
How does it feel?
It shows up as fatigue, brain fog, and the annoying tiredness where you slept enough hours but still feel like you didn’t. People with more social jetlag have higher levels of cortisol (our stress hormone) along with a higher resting heart rate. Researchers also found that social jetlag was linked to worse mood and poorer overall health, independent of how much sleep people actually got. One worrying number from that study: every additional hour of social jetlag was tied to an 11% higher likelihood of heart disease.
Over time, the science points to bigger consequences too, including a higher risk of weight gain and diabetes, high blood pressure, and a raised risk of heart disease. So unfortunately, it’s not just about being cranky on Monday…
Can I avoid this discomfort and keep having fun?
The good news is you don’t need to become antisocial and get to bed 9 pm every night (if that’s what you don’t want, of course). There are some good ways to protect your sleep health that might save you a lot of trouble in the long run:
Keep your wake-up time steady, even if you go to bed later. Sleep experts recommend sticking with roughly the same bedtime and wake time all week, and if you can’t manage that exactly, giving yourself about an hour in either direction is fine. If Saturday night runs late, try not to let Sunday morning slide too far past your usual hour.
Get some daylight in the morning. Exposing yourself to natural light first thing in the morning helps keep your circadian rhythm on track and supports better sleep at night. This is an easy one: when you wake up, open your window and stare at something outside, if only for a couple of minutes.
Dial down the blue light before bed. Cutting back on screen exposure in the evening helps your body release melatonin earlier, which makes falling asleep easier. Try putting the phone down a little earlier than usual, especially after a late night out.
Practice your consistency. The whole point is to give your body a rhythm it can count on most of the time, so the occasional late night doesn't throw everything off for days.
Is this my excuse to stay at home and not socialize?
Absolutely not! Sleep matters enormously for our health and longevity, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Sometimes, the late night with people you love is exactly what your mental health needs, even if your sleep schedule gets messy. Genuine human connection and fun make us happier, and that’s what life is about. And as always, balance is the key.
Yours truly,
The Stoic Team
P.S. If this sleep talk got you curious about your own patterns, we’ve got a whole collection of guided journals and exercises in the app built for exactly that.
The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.
Wilson Mizener
Picking the right angle, waiting for good light, choosing filters, and funny captions – it’s what we all do when we want to look good in our socials. This week, we’ll examine why we do that. Because there’s a gap between the real version of you and the one that you carefully pick to show to people.
Every day until Sunday, you’ll get one new prompt in Stoic, inviting you to get curious about when different versions of you show up and how you choose them. So open the app and get behind the picture for once. It’s much more interesting back there than you think!
