WAKE-UP CALL
Can perennial night owls become morning people?
In the entrepreneurial world, it’s worn as a badge of honour: Apple CEO Tim Cook jumps out of bed at 3:45am sharp, Richard Branson wakes at 5:45am to exercise, and without the call of an alarm, Oprah rises before 6:20. Beyond the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep we should be clocking each night, science says that rising early can make us smarter, happier, fitter and even more successful. Since sleep crusader and entrepreneur Arianna Huffington ignited a conversation around the importance of a restful slumber with her best-selling book The Sleep Revolution, the notion of retiring early to bed, and therefore being early to rise, has been the topic of much debate. But, even if we genuinely want to be up with the sparrows, can we alter our daily call time?
Many of us can relate to the feeling of late nights, irregular sleep patterns and rushing to the office each morning harbouring an enduring feeling of internal chaos. Sleep expert and author Dr Carmel Harrington, who founded Sydney sleep clinic Sleep for Health, says the ability to wake up early comes down to our individual chronotype – that is, the body’s control system naturally determining the time that feels right to go to bed and wake up. “A person’s chronotype is genetically determined, so we can blame our parents if we find it difficult to wake up and get going in the morning,” says Harrington, adding that like many of the traits we inherit, we do have the ability to tweak certain sleep behaviours.
Society agrees we should. As any perennial night owl knows, waking up for an 8am meeting or to sit in an office can result in tiredness, lethargy and a lack of attentiveness. Put simply, social norms naturally favour early risers. But technology and our always-on existence have shifted our behaviour so radically that we’re staying up much later than was ever intended. Even if we’re not predisposed to hit the pillow at midnight or later, blue light from our devices and our perpetual state of connectedness (Instagram, Facebook, emails) is keeping our minds and bodies on high alert well into the evening, whether our internal clock likes it or not. “The time we like to get up in the morning has a kick-on effect and sets the time we start to fell sleepy and want to go to bed,” says Harrington.
A 2016 study by University of California researchers found that using your phone around bedtime (or let’s be honest, in bed) lengthens the time it takes to fall asleep and results in poorer sleep quality overall. This means that even if we drag ourselves out of bed for a 5:15am sweat session, we’re curtailing our sleep, and the shut-eye we did manage overnight probably wasn’t that great.
“Your habits can drive you in one direction or the other and there’s something about our biology that makes us tend toward the evening more easily,” says University of Queensland associate professor Simon Smith. “It’s easier to stay up late, but it’s hard to wake up early.”
While genetic and lifestyle factors are tailored towards evening activity, a few simple tweaks can influence our ability to rise before 7am feeling well rested and recharged for the day ahead. As anyone who has adjusted their wake-up time for a flight or important meeting knows, going to bed a few hours earlier will look something like this: tossing, turning and lying alert and awake until you reach your usual bedtime hour. Smith recommends going to bed 15 minutes earlier to adjust your body clock gradually. “Do this for three to five days until you find yourself wanting to go to bed that little bit earlier.” Once you’ve adjusted, again adjust your bedtime by 15 minutes and “continue along in this pattern until you’re at your ideal wake-up time. At this point you’ll also find that you’ll want to go to sleep and are able to get to sleep at the appropriate time for an early morning wake-up.”
As well as adjusting the time you go to bed, a workout at first light can help sway the body clock into a morning routine. “Exercise and sunlight work really strongly together: your body knows it’s up and awake, so you’re giving it a really strong signal to get up and go,” says Smith. Any form of exercise from park runs and high-intensity interval training to a nurturing yoga session is enough to wake up the mind and body in the early hours.
Above all, where sleep is concerned our body craves regularity, so it’s important to adhere to a strict schedule. “People tend to get up at six and go for a jog or for an espresso, but it’s not just the earliness, it’s also the regularity of that,” says Smith.
Professor Till Roenneberg from the University of Munich has devoted much of his research to sleep patterns. He dubbed the phrase ‘social jet lag’, that is, the feeling of tiredness we often harbour early in the week – much like actual jet lag – after a weekend of staying up and lying in later, which results in disrupted sleep patterns. A 2017 study published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that this seesawing of sleep can even be linked to an 11 per cent increase in the likelihood of cardiovascular disease as well as mood swings and poorer overall health. It’s seems that Monday-itis really does exist.
But there are some simple ways to ensure you adhere to a sleep routine. Set a reminder on your phone to go to bed at the same time each night, even if you don’t feel sleepy (and then leave your device outside the bedroom). Moreover, dim the lighting in your living spaces two hours before bedtime to calm the mind. “A warm shower also helps,” says Harrington. “And a very simple yoga exercise can actually relax the body and relax the mind, bringing it down from its daytime activity levels.”
“Your habits can drive you in one direction or the other and there’s something about our biology that makes us tend toward the evening more easily”