26,000 Samples of Morning Urine Reveal the Effects of Sleep Deprivation

A morning pee contains a surprising amount of information. A light yellow is probably a good sign, while a darker yellow may tell a tale of dehydration. For those who tend to be on the darker end of the spectrum, new research suggests that the problem may not lie solely in neglecting to drink enough liquids. According to a paper published Monday in the journal Sleep, it might also have something to do with how many hours of sleep you manage to get.

In the short term, depriving the body of water can generally worsen one’s mood or even cause pounding headaches, says Asher Rosinger, Ph.D., assistant professor of biobehavioral health and anthropology at Penn State. Not taking care to actively drink water during the day is usually the driver behind this, though the paper he first-authored, which analyzed over 26,000 subjects gleaned from two national surveys in the US and China, found that people who slept less than eight hours tended to have certain markers of dehydration lingering in their urine samples.

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