EARLY BIRDS VS NIGHT OWLS
The larks get all the best worms. Or so they say. But setting your alarm clock for five sharp won’t make you a morning person. And striving to be one might be doing you more harm than good.
Conventional wisdom has it that you need to be up with the lark to make it in this world. But is that really the case?
‘IS this about how much you hate me in the mornings?’ My husband, having spotted the title of this article, ventures an educated guess at its contents. I mean, he’s not wrong. Over the past seven years, he has tried his utmost to ‘convert’ me to his way of life. A life that includes sunrises and early-morning workouts, and a chipper, golden retriever-type attitude that will no doubt be the focus of my murder trial.
His efforts have been in vain. Anything that happens before 9am holds zero interest for me. If we could make it 10.30am and throw in a coffee, then sure.
In my 20s I had a roommate who would just shuffle past me in the hallway in the mornings without so much as a nod. Come 11pm, however, we would be sitting on the balcony drinking wine
and laughing like drains. The joys of cohabiting with a fellow night owl.
For some inexplicable reason, the world collectively decided that being a morning person is the ideal. I’m guessing they had a vote, and scheduled it for 5am.
We hear it all the time: ‘The early bird catches the worm.’ That old chestnut. ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ That one is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but historians have actually traced the saying back to scripts long predating his birth. Benji probably just trotted it out so often that people assumed it was his expression – he himself liked to get up at the crack of dawn and clearly quite fancied the idea that it was a sign of virtue.
Skip ahead a few centuries, and not much has changed. Many highprofile businesspeople attribute their success to their pre-dawn wake-up time. Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Anna Wintour and Sheryl Sandberg are all early risers, and proud of it. Richard Branson gets up before 6am to exercise. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey springs out of bed at 5.30am to go for a jog. Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, is up at four. And Apple CEO Tim Cook, for some unfathomable reason, reportedly gets up at 3.45am.
Okay, fine. I see your CEOs and your moguls, and I raise you a whole bunch of prolific writers, musicians, poets, thinkers – and a world leader or two for good measure. Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Carl Jung, Prince and Christina Aguilera. Night owls. Just like the hobbits he wrote about, Tolkien liked to stay up late and get up late. And Bob Dylan, James Joyce and Marcel Proust reportedly do/did their best work at night.
Winston Churchill stayed in bed until about 11am, ‘for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers’. That sounds like a work set-up I can get behind. None of these 8am Zoom meetings I keep getting roped into.
Barack Obama is a self-confessed ‘night guy’, who put in long hours after dark while he was in the White House. He saw these solitary stints as essential to his time as president, and spent them reading briefings, writing emails and doing everything he didn’t have time for during the day. ‘Everybody carves out their time to get their thoughts together,’ his chief of staff told The New York Times. ‘There is no doubt that window is his window.’
We also have some CEOs in our late-night camp. In a Facebook Live session, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told comedian Jerry Seinfeld that he was ‘never a morning person’. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who also cofounded The Huffington Post, sleeps until 8.30am. And Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian goes to bed around 2am and ‘tries to get up’ by 10am.
Despite the fact that I can rustle up just as many night owl success stories, positive attitudes towards ‘morningness’ (incidentally, a real word) are deeply ingrained.
The subject is a firm favourite among researchers and there are think pieces galore hammering the message home: early risers are go-getters and leaders; late risers are lazy slackers. In 2016, Business Insider reported that there was one thing most rich people had in common – they wake up early. They cited a five-year study of 177 self-made millionaires by author Thomas C Corley, who found that ‘nearly 50% of them woke up at least three hours before their workday actually began’. Nearly.
So, less than half. Can you then not also deduce that more than 50% of them didn’t wake up early? Why isn’t that the headline?
Through his research, a German biology professor named Christoph Randler found that morning people got better marks in school, which led to better tertiary education opportunities and better job prospects. But is that because they are innately smarter and more ambitious, or because society is set up in their favour?
‘When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards,’ Professor Randler told the Harvard Business Review. ‘Though evening people do have some advantages – other studies reveal they tend to be smarter and more creative than morning types, have a better sense of humour and are more outgoing – they’re out of sync with the typical corporate schedule.’
Scientists have figured out that your body has A unique, personalised circadian rhythm known As A chronotype. In short, there Are three basic ‘types’: early, intermediate or late.
Night owls have also been slapped with a few other undesirable labels: we are supposedly also unhealthy, unfit
and unhappy.
Here’s my question: are night owls more prone to all these ailments because they stay up too late? Or is it because they are forced to get up earlier than they usually Karen with Chewbacca would, the Great thereby Dane. denying their bodies’ innate circadian rhythms?
‘Few people are even aware that morningness and eveningness have a powerful biological component,’ says Professor Randler.
Ever heard of chronobiology? It’s the study of the biochemical clocks that keep our natural physiological rhythms. Scientists have figured out that each of us has an optimal bedtime and an optimal wakeup time; your body has a unique, personalised circadian rhythm known as a chronotype. In short, there are three basic ‘types’: early, intermediate or late. If you’re not sure where you fall, you’re probably somewhere in the middle. (There are tests available if you’re interested: just Google ‘HorneÖstberg questionnaire’ or ‘Munich Chronotype Questionnaire’.)
If you’re reading this, smug in the knowledge that you’re a lark by nature, answer me this: do you rely on an alarm clock to wake in the mornings? If so, you are not in sync with your body clock. Most of us have to be up and at ’em at a certain time, so who even knows what your body really wants? The best way to reveal your natural cycle is while on holiday – go to bed when you’re tired and let yourself wake naturally in the morning. (I can hear the parents of small kids snorting at the notion. Obviously, we’re talking ideal-world scenarios here, guys.)
If the body’s circadian rhythms are governed by light, why does the late chronotype even exist?
In Till Roenneberg’s book Internal Time, the German chronobiologist and world sleep expert posits some theories. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense: someone has to stand guard at night – ideally, someone who won’t nod off at his post. And although early birds get all the credit for bringing home those worms, some of humankind’s natural prey is nocturnal, making them easier to track and hunt after dark. Night owls served their communities – by keeping watch late into the night, and going hunting after dark when they were most alert.
While someone with an early chronotype is perfectly happy clocking in at the office bright and early, anyone with a late chronotype who is forced to wake up earlier than they would like is probably suffering from what Roenneberg calls ‘social jet lag’.
Feeling a bit groggy doesn’t sound like the end of the world, but it actually goes beyond being tired. Going against your chronotype can have major physical repercussions. A night owl’s body might still be producing melatonin when they wake up early. ‘Then you disrupt it and push the body to be in daytime mode. That can have lots of negative physiological consequences,’ says Roenneberg. One example? It can impact sensitivity to insulin and glucose, which can result in weight gain.
Altering your biorhythms can interfere with a range of body functions – you won’t sleep as well or as long, leading to not only fatigue and poor work performance, but also health issues ranging from low immunity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease to mood problems, anxiety and depression.
‘If people are left to their naturally preferred times, they feel much better,’ says Oxford University biologist Katharina Wulff, who studies chronobiology and sleep. ‘They say that they are much more productive. The mental capacity they have is much broader.’
IN 2019, Vanessa Barbara wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times entitled ‘Early
to Bed, Early to Rise Makes Me Exhausted, Depressed and Sick’. She suffers from delayed sleep phase syndrome, ‘a chronic misalignment of the body’s circadian rhythms with the daily light-dark cycle of our environment’. It means that, if left to her own devices, she prefers to go to bed around 6am and sleep until 4pm. Great if you’re a vampire, less than ideal if you’re trying to hold down a nine-to-five.
The stigma is real, says Barbara. ‘I often say that I work nights, which is true – it’s just not the whole story. Most people respect workrelated excuses, but sneer at health conditions they’ve never heard of.
‘That’s the worst thing about having a circadian rhythm disorder: living in a society that places a moral value on the time your alarm clock goes off. Most cultures emphatically equate early rising with righteousness: as we say in Brazil [she lives in São Paulo], “God helps those who wake up early.”’
For years, she took melatonin and Ambien in an attempt to get to sleep at a regular hour, but she would inevitably wake up groggy, tired and depressed. ‘According to conventional wisdom, going to bed early and waking up with the birds is a mere matter of habit and willpower,’ she writes. ‘This misconception is widespread, even among doctors. And for a long time, I believed it.’
Although chronotypes do sometimes shift with age (kids and older people tend to favour mornings, whereas adolescents and young adults typically prefer evenings), the idea that you can change your chronotype is, for the most part, a fallacy.
‘People can be trained to alter… their chronotypes, but only somewhat,’ says Professor Randler. ‘In one study, about half of school pupils were able to shift their daily sleep-wake schedules by one hour. But significant change can be a challenge. About 50% of a person’s chronotype is due to genetics.’
I can attest to that. I come from a family of night owls, and never is that clearer than in December, when we rent out a big beach house. In the house, there are two very different types of people. The ones who like to lie in, and the ones who spring out of bed at sparrow’s fart.
You can probably guess which camp I am in, and which my husband occupies. By the time my cousins and I emerge bleary-eyed from our bedrooms, croaking, ‘What time is it?’, the in-laws have already had coffee, chatted to the neighbour who bakes bread, taken the kids down to the river to look for crabs and possibly even gone for a run.
However, come 10pm, that same formerly sprightly set has gone to bed or they’re nodding off in their armchairs. Meanwhile, this is when we get going. We drink gin and tonics, play raucous card games, and sit around chatting and laughing. There’s always someone plugging away at a giant puzzle or reading a book, and fighting over who gets the green triangle Quality Streets.
And if eating Quality Streets at midnight and cackling manically when you win at Sevens is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
‘Most cultures emphatically equate early rising with righteousness.’