To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Even that will require significant external input – like super-bright morning light (at least 2,000 lux), she says.Īs long as that dawn wake-up isn’t guaranteeing us CEO status, we think we’ll hit snooze on any major changes to our schedule. In real terms? “The normal person may be able to handle 1.5 hours and achieve a stable entrainment,” says Wulff. And because night owls tend to have a longer circadian cycle, putting them even more at odds with a 24-hour schedule, that can be tougher for them to achieve. But because you’re effectively overriding your biology, any changes take discipline and must be consistent to last. Still think you’d be better off if you shifted to becoming a morning person? Morning exposure to bright (or natural) light, avoiding artificial light at night and carefully-timed melatonin intake can help. “There is a dopamine receptor gene that has been previously associated with both increased creativity and also with insomnia and sleep disturbance,” she says. But there may be a connection to genetics. Again, correlation isn’t causation, she says. In one recent study, for example, the University of Haifa’s Neta Ram-Vlasov found that more visually-creative people had more sleep disturbances, such as waking several times at night or insomnia. Other research also has hinted that your sleep preference may be biologically ‘bundled’ with other characteristics.
As one recent study found, even as people tried to become ‘morning’ people, it didn’t make them have a better mood or life satisfaction, suggesting these traits are “intrinsic components of the late chronotype.” The only ones who don’t may inherently have more rebellious, or individualistic, traits.īut shifting someone’s chronotype doesn’t necessarily change these traits. For a night owl waking at 7am, her body still thinks she’s asleep and is acting accordingly, so she’s groggy for much longer than a morning person who wakes up at the same time.īecause the cultural stereotype is that people who go to bed and rise late are lazy, most people probably try to become morning people as much as they can. That means people who enjoy rising early will be more aligned with their workday and likely to achieve more. If you’re a morning person, a combination of biological changes, from your hormones to body temperature, will get you up and at 'em way ahead of your night owl peers. Instead, it may be that most of us are expected to start work or school by 8 or 9am. In other words, it’s not clear that waking up early itself provides the benefit.
#MORNING BIRD NIGHT OWL MEME PLUS#
( Famous late risers include Box CEO Aaron Levie and Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, plus creatives like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Gustave Flaubert).īut more importantly, in a phrase beloved by academics everywhere, correlation isn’t causation. First, not all high achievers are early risers, and not all early risers are successful. In our rush to figure out the ‘secrets’ of success, we tend to forget a couple of things. But compared to your peers, you’ll probably always fall within the same rough part of the spectrum. Children tend toward morning, with a peak shift toward night around age 20 and a slight change back toward morning at around age 50.
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