Rules are made to be broken.

You know the saying. I know you do. So please keep it in mind as you read what follows.

“Addressing the full spectrum of coffee’s correlations with health and disease is therefore an important but challenging task.”

Now it doesn’t matter if you ever took Journalism 101 or not. Everyone knows what’s wrong with what you just read: A journalist should never use a quotation without including its source.

But I do so intentionally, in part so you don’t get sidetracked by the lead author’s lengthy title or the hard-to-say, 23-letter name of the journal in which her words appear. But for the most part, the intentional miscue is an attempt to draw your focus to the one word in the statement that makes no sense when the quotation’s taken out of context.

“Therefore.”

Therefore means “for that reason,” yet none is given. Which means I’ve broken a second writing rule: being vague instead of specific.

But vague actually works here. For when researchers used two large gene data bases containing information on nearly 500,000 people to hunt for correlations, they realized what they found could best be metaphorically forwarded to the world in a envelope with a one-word return address: Vagaries.

The information from one gene data bank revealed a genetic link between the genes that predispose you to drink coffee and those that tend to make you anxious, depressed, and even develop bipolar disorder — yet the other didn’t.

A vagary to ponder for sure, but you’ll learn no more about that specific study here, whose lead author is Hayley H. A. Thorpe, Ph.D., at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University in Ontario, Canada and was published in the June 2024 issue of Neuropsychopharmacology, for it has already served its purpose.

To establish that scientific research has its fair share of vagaries.

In and by itself, that fact is neither good nor bad. It is, however, one more example of why, if you truly are striving to reach a high level of health and fitness, you need to do more than just read the latest scientific research.

You need to do your own. Which means you experiment on yourself.

This is very apparent and very important when it comes to sleep.

For I have known people who have functioned well for years while getting only five or six hours of sleep per night. Yet I’ve known a few others who need even more than the standard eight hours a night or they fall apart.

Which is why the information found in a study presented at the European Society of Cardiology’s ESC Congress 2024 earlier this month is worth your consideration.

The vagaries it contains call into question the long-held notion that a healthy sleep pattern needs to be a consistent sleep pattern. Not to mention, it just might free you from the guilt that usually comes from doing something sometimes seen as a necessity for maintaining your mental health — until the alarm sounds on a Monday.

Sleeping in on weekends.

That’s because the big news contained in the study is that you can undo some of the damage that comes from sleeping too little and too erratically by doing so.

Working as part of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, a grouping of university and research institutions supported by the government of China, the researchers used self-reported data housed in the UK Biobank on more than 90,000 people to see whether or not there’s a link between irregular sleep patterns and heart disease. They considered a person to be sleep deprived if he or she reported sleeping less than 7 hours per night.

The researchers then created four categories of the sleep deprived based on how much additional sleep they got on weekends. After a follow-up that averaged 14 years, the researchers found that those in the category of sleeping the most on weekends to compensate for their weekday sleep deprivation were 19 percent less likely to have developed heart disease when compared to those who did the least to offset the deficit.

Now I realize you don’t have 14 years to experiment, but if you are among the 36.8 percent of Americans according to a 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey who are sleep deprived, you should have a couple of weekends to do so — and good instincts about what harms and hurts your health. So you won’t need to go to the doc to get checked out to determine if your experiment was successful.

You’ll know simply by how you feel.

And to add additional intrigue to the sleeping-in-on-weekends experiment, I’ll end with this. If sleeping in on weekends does indeed improve the heart health of the sleep deprived, it possibly — dare I say probably? — mitigates other health problems that are more likely to occur among the sleep derived.

Like kidney disease, diabetes, obesity, and a slew of mental illnesses.