Older adults who kept consistent daily schedules reported less physical pain and fewer depressive symptoms than those with irregular routines, and the pattern held regardless of how well they slept, according to research published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
The study is small. It included 67 people, and it measured everything at a single point in time, which means it cannot show that regular schedules produced the better outcomes. It is a reasonable prompt to think about the shape of a day, not evidence that fixing your wake time will fix chronic pain.
