The true value of night owls
It’s hard being a night owl. Those who stay up late and sleep later in the mornings are often derided as lazy, while research suggests they might have worse health outcomes, too.
In 2018, researchers at Northwestern University reported on 433,000 adults who filled in a questionnaire to determine whether they were larks – morning people who get up and go to bed early – or owls. (This quality is now estimated to be about 50 per cent inherited, and around 10 per cent of people qualify as larks, 20 per cent night owls, with the rest somewhere in between.) Six years later, the team found owls were 10 per cent more likely to die younger, 90 per cent more likely to have a psychological disorder, and 30 per cent more likely to have a health problem.
More recently, Elise Facerchilds and colleagues at the University of Birmingham invited 38 larks and owls to take a series of cognitive and behaviour tests while undergoing an MRI scan. As you might expect, larks outperformed owls, showed greater brain connectivity and felt most awake in the morning.
Although owls felt more awake in the evening and had faster reaction times than in the morning, at no time was their performance significantly better than the larks.
Last week came more research by the universities of Birmingham and Surrey
and Monash University in Australia. They recruited 22 extreme owls – individuals who go to bed around 2.30am and don’t wake until after 10am – and asked them to follow a set of strict guidelines, including earlier rising and bedtimes, set meal times and cut-off times for drinking caffeine and taking exercise. After three weeks, participants had moved their body clock two to three hours earlier and reported greater wellbeing and alertness.
Although these findings might be considered cheering news, the implication that there’s something wrong with owls bothers me. After all, according to anthropologists, it’s as much down to owls as larks that humans are alive today.
David Samson at the University of Toronto wanted to understand why humans vary so much in terms of circadian rhythm. He and his team travelled to Northern Tanzania to study the Hadza people, who lead a hunter-gatherer existence much like our Pleistocene ancestors. This lifestyle demands vigilance from outside threats at all times. Thirty-three adults agreed to wear sleep/wake monitors for 20 days and nights.
Throughout the entire period there were only 18 minutes when everyone was asleep, and on average only 60.6 per cent of them were asleep at any given moment. Samson suggests this has favoured groups who have among them individuals with widely differing circadian rhythms, as that way there’s always someone alert and on guard.
If you’re an owl but must rise early, by all means try some of the new suggestions.
But at the same time, let’s all campaign for more flexible working hours and school schedules so owls and larks can perform when they’re at their best.
Linda Blair is a clinical psychologist and author of Siblings: How to Handle Rivalry and Create Lifelong Loving
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