Are You A Night Owl?

Are You A Night Owl?

The age-old expression, “the early bird catches the worm,” commends people who get up early in the morning, start their work, and accomplish important tasks early in the day. While some believe these “morning larks” are more productive, a large British study is giving night owls their due. 

Researchers at Imperial College London found that people who identified as night owls—people who prefer to be active late at night and get up later than what’s considered normal—scored higher in intelligence, reasoning, and memory tests than people who described themselves as a “morning person.” 

The researchers used data from more than 26,000 people in the UK Biobank database to find out how different aspects of sleep affected mental sharpness and overall cognitive ability. The research team looked at sleep duration (how long a person slept), quality of sleep, and chronotype—a person’s preference for evening or morning activity, commonly referred to as “night owls” and “morning larks,” respectively.

“We found that sleep duration has a direct effect on brain function, and we believe that proactively managing sleep patterns is really important for boosting, and safeguarding, the way our brains work,” Daqing Ma, co-leader of the study and a professor of anesthesia at Imperial’s Department of Surgery and Cancer, said in a press release. 

According to the study, sleeping between seven and nine hours a night improved cognitive functions, such as memory, reasoning, and speed of processing information. Researchers noted that people who maintained this sleep duration scored higher in cognitive tests. However, sleeping for fewer than seven hours or more than nine hours harmed brain function.

The research team also discovered that night owls and “intermediate types”—those who said they preferred either day or night—had “superior cognitive function.” According to the study, “morning types” consistently had the lowest cognitive scores. 

The study did not explain why night owls performed better than morning people. Dr. Raha West, the lead author of the study, noted that this does not mean all morning people have worse cognitive performance. 

Some experts advised caution in analyzing the study’s findings. 

“Without a detailed picture of what is going on in the brain, we don’t know if being a ‘morning’ or ‘evening’ person affects memory and thinking, or if a decline in cognition is causing changes to sleeping patterns,” Jacqui Hanley, head of research funding at Alzheimer’s Research UK, told The Guardian. 

Additionally, Jessica Chelekis, a senior lecturer in sustainability global value chains and sleep expert at Brunel University London, told The Guardian that there were “important limitations” to the study because the research did not account for education attainment, or include the time of day the cognitive tests were conducted in the results. The main value of the study was challenging stereotypes around sleep, she added.

Tips To Help Night Owls Function Better

While people who preferred evenings had the advantage of studying, practically speaking, they were forced to go to school, work, make appointments, or carry out tasks in the morning hours. Having to perform activities at times that go against a person’s chronotype is what experts call “social jetlag.” However, these experts say there are ways that night owls can adapt to a morning lark world.

1. Embrace Your Chronotype

Preferring to function at night is not just a lifestyle choice, it’s also part of a person’s genes and a person’s age, according to Martha Merrow, Professor of Chronobiology at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. For example, 20-year-olds sleep, on average and according to their biological drive, almost 2.5 hours longer than young children or 50-year-old adults, Merrow said. 

So, night owls should not try to change who they really are, Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, told BBC Science Focus, “It’s very important not to just abandon your chronotype. You’re biologically programmed to go to bed late and get up late.”

2. Shift Your Body’s Internal Clock

The circadian rhythm is the body’s 24-hour internal clock that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. Exposure to light can have an affect on the body’s internal clock. For instance, morning light can advance, or speed up, the circadian rhythm while evening and night light can delay the internal clock. 

Foster, author of Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health, recommends night owls get plenty of exposure to daylight earlier in the morning while avoiding exposure to daylight late in the day. It will be hard to do at first, Foster said, but after a while, the morning light exposure will advance your body’s circadian rhythm and make you feel more alert earlier in the day while avoiding exposure to evening light delays the internal clock. 

Merrow recommends limiting exposure to blue light—the wavelength of visible light that the circadian rhythm is most sensitive to—in the evening. For those who tend to use laptops, smartphones, TVs, and other digital devices that emit blue light, Merrow suggests wearing glasses that block blue light. 

“If you put these on, you will often easily note feeling sleepy earlier as the alerting effects of blue light are muted,” Merrow told BBC’s Science Focus. “I don’t endorse any specific brand, but these glasses are easy to find over the internet, they usually have plastic, wrap-around orange lenses and they are quite cheap.”

3. Get Enough Sleep

Living the life of a night owl while consistently rising early in the morning to accommodate a morning lark schedule raises the risk of developing health problems. Living “out of step with your circadian rhythm” because of the stress and loss of sleep has been linked to cardiovascular issues, immune disease, and inflammatory illness, Foster said. This is why it is important to try to shift your internal clock forward as much as possible so that it is easier to get up in the morning and go to sleep earlier in the night. 

4. Take A Brief Nap

One way night owls living a morning lark’s life can compensate for their sleep loss is to take a short nap, ideally in the late morning or early afternoon, so that the nap doesn’t interfere with their sleep drive at night-time.

“A short 20-minute nap has been shown clearly to improve your performance during the second half of the day,” Foster told BBC Science Focus. Sleeping longer than 20 minutes can result in feeling groggy after waking up.

Foster recommends the “coffee-napping hack” where you set your alarm, drink coffee, and then take a nap.  When you wake up, the caffeine from the coffee will make you feel alert again. 

Although it will take some discipline and conscious effort, experts say it’s possible for night owls to avoid a lot of suffering in a morning-lark society.

Source Links:  

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/11/night-owls-cognitive-function-superior-to-early-risers-study-suggests?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/night-owls-how-to-thrive
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/254738/being-night-associated-with-mental-sharpness/

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