Be bold. Live life on your own terms. March to the beat of your own drum.

These are not the opening words of my soon-to-be-published self-help book. They are mine, however, and came to mind after I received an email from a reader.

The 56-year-old Texan, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote, “Weirdly enough, the deadlift, usually considered the exercise that will ruin your back, was the one that solved my back pain.”

I’m thrilled for the guy and pretty pleased about the email, too. For he solved his back pain by doing what I so often suggest you do to take more control of your health: experiment, experiment, experiment.

So, as cliche as it sounds, be bold, live life on your own terms, and march to the beat of your own drum. And if that forge ahead and accompanying music lead you to something that seems counterintuitive, don’t shy away from it.

Just make sure your marching boots are double laced, your steps are measured, and you watch where you tread. Do all that and you may one day email me what the Texan did: “I am stronger than I have ever been before in my life.”

Or perhaps you’ll write that you’re feeling so much better since you’ve started going to bed earlier and sleeping more, something that wouldn’t surprise me one bit. And my lack of surprise is based not only personal experience and all sorts of prior sleep research but also a recent study published in March by BMC Cardiovascular Disorders.

It suggests the combination of an irregular bedtime and sleeping less than eight hours a night puts you and your heart at additional risk.

Researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland concocted this long-term study of middle-aged adults by working with 3,231 of the participants from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 who attended a follow-up study in 2012. Sometime after that, these now middle-aged adults wore activity monitors around the clock and for up to two weeks to provide the researchers with seven consecutive nights of sleep data, which allowed the researchers to determine total sleep time and “sleep timing regularity.”

Bedtime, wake-up time, and sleep midpoint (the halfway point between the two), were all considered in establishing the latter and led to the participants being placed in one of three equally divided groups: regular, fairly regular, or irregular sleepers. The researchers then allowed a decade to pass before checking the participants’ medical histories for MACE, major adverse cardiac events such as heart attack; heart failure; stroke; severe heart pain, like angina; and procedures needed to restore blood flow, like bypass surgery.

They discovered those categorized as irregular sleepers who slept less than the median sleep time of the entire group (seven hours and 56 minutes), had “a two-fold higher risk of experiencing MACE, compared to those with regular bedtimes and sleep midpoints.”

In a Medical News Today article about this study, Cheng-Han Chen, MD, a board-certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center, calls this two-fold increase “a significant and meaningful difference.” Add to that the CDC’s list of benefits of getting sufficient sleep in addition to the findings in the Finland study — an improvement in attention, memory, and mood; a reduction in stress; and a lessened incidence of gaining weight, getting sick, type 2 diabetes, other metabolic conditions, and being in motor vehicle crashes — and it may once again be time for you to experiment, experiment, experiment.

Not only because so many of us are indeed sleep deficient, but also because there are a few odd findings in the Finland study.

First, “wake-up time variability was not associated with MACE incidence in participants, which “suggests that wake-up time regularity, unlike bedtime or sleep midpoint, may not be a predictor of cardiovascular events.” Yet a prior study, also published in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders, found a “higher prevalence of hypertension” — often a harbinger of serious heart trouble — in individuals who report waking up either very early or late when compared to those whose wake-up times fall in between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.

Second, since “irregular sleep timing” was not linked to survival risk when the sleep period exceeded eight hours, “sufficient sleep may offer partial protection regardless of the regularity of sleep timing.” Yet the generally recommended amount of sleep time is a broad window, between seven and nine hours a night, although it usually comes with info similar to what’s found on the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s website.

That adults who sleep less than seven hours a night are more likely to have health issues than those who sleep more than that. That sleeping more than nine hours a night is not necessarily harmful and may be helpful for young adults, people battling sickness or disease, or those who are sleep deprived.