Scientists Find the Happiest Time of Day

Your mood is bound to fluctuate over the course of a day. But there's a good chance you'll be in the best spirits soon after you wake up, according to researchers, who set out to determine what hour, day, and season people generally have the best mental health. University College London researchers questioned nearly 50,000 survey respondents, mostly educated women, from March 2020 to March 2022, finding that "generally, things do seem better in the morning," per the study published Tuesday in BMJ Mental Health. After some fluctuation, mental health tends to hit a low around midnight, researchers gauged based on responses to questions about happiness, life satisfaction, the sense of life's worth, and loneliness.

Noting the findings may have been influenced by the very time of day a participant filled out their questionnaire, researchers say a person's circadian rhythm, the internal clock that controls the body's sleep-wake cycle, likely explains why morning time feels so good. Cortisol, the main stress hormone that helps control mood, motivation, and fear, "peaks shortly after waking and reaches its lowest levels around bedtime," researchers note, per the Guardian. Weekend mornings proved happier than weekday mornings, but people felt worse on weekend nights than weekday evenings, per the Telegraph. Weekends also gave more variation in feeling based on time of day.

Across a week, loneliness didn't alter much. But happiness, life satisfaction, and ratings on life's worth were lower on Sundays than on Mondays and Fridays, per a release. As for seasons, participants reported higher levels of loneliness and depressive and anxiety symptoms and lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction in winter than during the other seasons, possibly due to weather. Perhaps unsurprisingly, summer triggered the best mental health across all outcomes, per the Guardian. If the findings are validated, lead study author Dr. Feifei Bu says mental health researchers "should take into account the time of day people respond" to surveys, while mental health support services might consider "prioritizing late-night availability." (More mental health stories.)