Love staying up late to catch up on extra work? You may think you're a natural night owl — but you could be hurting your overall physical and emotional health.

Intriguing research suggests you might want to flip the switch on your schedule to improve both your work and personal lives. Here's why:

A study by the University of Surrey in the U.K. found that night owls have a 10 percent higher risk of dying sooner than people who go to bed early in the evening. How come?

Pushing your body clock back has both a psychological and physiological effect on your behavior — you feel more stressed, you eat later (and therefore store more calories), and you tend not to exercise the later it is.

To right your system and cut your risk of related cardiovascular and neurological disorders, start going to bed one hour earlier for several days until your body is used to falling asleep at a normal time. Then, the next morning, the researchers say it's very important to spend a few minutes in natural light as soon as you wake up — this exposure will cement the change you've regulated for your body clock, plus help you feel more alert during the day and sleep better at night.

The earlier you eat breakfast, the lower your diabetes risk. A study by the University of Illinois Chicago found that people who rose in time to eat a healthy meal between 7:00 and 8:30 a.m. had a lower BMI, improved their diabetes symptoms and/or cut their risk for the disease over time.

On the other hand, people who slept later and ate breakfast between 7:30 and 9 a.m. saw no improvement in their BMI or existing diabetes symptoms and did not cut their risk for developing the disease if they didn't yet have it.

Losing sleep can potentially cause a 5 percent increase in your chance of developing Alzheimer’s, according to the NIH. The reason is an increase in the protein beta-amyloid, which can clump to form plaque in the thalmus and hippocampus regions of the brain (the parts that are vulnerable to Alzheimer’s). The more sleep you get, the less risk you face.

Less sleep may make you feel isolated from your co-workers. If you snooze less than seven-and-a-half hours a night, U.K. researchers found that you're 24 percent more likely to feel lonely, isolated and left out of social activities.

This is because sleep disturbance causes a biological response that cements negative thoughts in your head, so you convince yourself you're completely alone. Rest stops this process and corrects your thinking so you’re more willing to bond with team members on a project and feel good about your work relationships.

Sleep cements concentration. If you don't get enough shut-eye, you're not likely to do well on detail-oriented tasks — it's an established fact of working life. Your best bet — go to bed early, get eight hours of sleep, then get up, refreshed, and tackle your work.