5/6/2023 0 Comments Night owl radioMalow says treatment often starts with seeing if people can adjust their work schedules to suit their biological rhythms. “What’s crazy,” Malow says, is that whether a person’s sleep habits are viewed as a disorder or simply a tendency “is going to depend more on their lifestyle and their employment than it is anything else.” About 0.2% to 1.7% of adults have this condition. When the obligations of waking life clash with one’s sleep schedule so badly that it’s difficult to function, night owldom shifts from a tendency to a condition known as delayed sleep-wake phase disorder, in which one’s circadian rhythms make daily functioning difficult. The problem comes when we have jobs or classes that don’t align with our circadian rhythms. “It’s the combination of early work start and long commute that is driving short sleep,” the study’s lead author, Dr Mathias Basner, director of Penn’s unit for experimental psychiatry, division of sleep and chronobiology, wrote in an email to the Guardian. And that might not just be the owls: a 2014 study found that, in general, the later work and class started, the more sleep participants (who were not all owls) got. The 9-5 schedule might be good for earlier risers, but it works against those who need to sleep later. (Ben Franklin was also a proponent of something akin to daylight savings time, which is a whole other circadian mess.) Bias against night owls is “purely cultural”, he says, citing Franklin, who helped found his university. “It’s not something like: ‘I’m gonna choose to be a night owl, and I’m lazy.’ It’s a biological preference.”ĭr Phil Gehrman, a clinical psychologist who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. Our chronotype is “part and parcel of who we are”, says Dr Beth Ann Malow, a neurologist and sleep expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In any case, night owls: you are not alone. A 2007 study found that the most common chronotype, accounting for 14.6% of people, slept from 12.09am to 8.18am in the absence of “social obligations” – but half the population slept later. Assessments of how common it is to be a night owl vary: experts who spoke to the Guardian had heard estimates around 15%, while a recent study in Finland found 10% of men and 12% of women to be “evening types”. Your daily sleep-wake schedule, called your chronotype, appears to be mostly genetic. “Your sleep habits are an in the path of every plan that constantly needs to be worked around.”īut night owls, take comfort: as Robin Williams once said to Matt Damon, it’s not your fault. More recently, a Reddit user put it simply: “Night owls suck,” the person wrote. In a 2018 essay in the Cut, Edith Zimmerman wrote that “waking up early gives you a surge of power you feel superior, smug”. It’s nothing new – centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin made the shockingly biased claim that “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”. It’s time for this circadian-rhythm-shaming to end. People’s sleep/wake cycles are inherently varied, and if you, too, are a late to bed, late to rise person, you’re simply a night owl – or, in clinical terms, you have a delayed sleep phase.
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