Complex Numbers

Asleep Under the Sun

https://www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evening-chronotypes-sleepi...

If you’re just not a morning person, science says you may never be

Sure, I'm a morning person. I'm at my best between about midnight and 4am. That's morning. And then I get my best sleep between 4am and noon. That, too, is morning.

Afternoons can be dreary.

Morning people and night owls are born that way. It's time we accepted that.

Yeah, right. People who think there's some moral superiority in waking up while it's still dark aren't going to change their minds. They have to feel superior about something, I suppose.

If Cassidy Sokolis ever needs to wake up before 11 am, she scatters three alarm clocks throughout her bedroom. Even then, she still often sleeps through the clamor.

Sounds familiar.

We all have a preferred, inborn time for sleeping. Science has validated the idea that there are "morning people," "evening people," and those in between. These are called chronotypes. And just like it’s rare for a person to be 7 feet tall, it’s rare for Sokolis to not be able to sleep until 3 am. We all have a chronotype, just like we all have a height.

Okay, but we can see your height.

And what's more, if we try to live out of sync with these clocks, our health likely suffers. The mismatch between internal time and real-world time has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and depression.

Oh, good; I can blame my biggest health issues on being forced to keep an 8-5 work schedule throughout my career. Score!

"Our clocks don’t run on exactly a 24-hour cycle," Gehrman says. They're closer to 24.3 hours. So every day our body clocks need to wind backward by just a little bit to stay on schedule.

I've heard variations of this in the past. As I recall, they studied this by keeping people in windowless rooms for extended periods of time, with no reference to timekeeping devices, and looked at what rhythm they fell into.

If that sounds like hell to you, believe me, I think so, too. After all, there's a clock on the computer. Going for days without a computer? The horror!

I have, on occasion, wondered what's up with the extra .3 hours (I've also heard .5 hours, but whatever). You'd think, maybe, "evolutionary holdover," but if anything, the Earth's rotation was faster in the distant past.

The second treatment is chronotherapy. Here, instead of pushing the body's clock backward it's wound forward. For a few weeks, a patient will go to bed two hours later every night until she reaches her desired sleep time. "It can work very well, but very few people have the absolute, total control of their schedule for the two weeks that it takes to do that," Gehrman says. Very few of his patients choose this option.

Pretty sure I've mentioned this sort of thing in this blog before, but I can't be arsed to look it up. I did do a sanity check to ensure I haven't linked this particular article before, and I don't think I have. In any case, I'm just quoting the bit above because of my confirmation bias.

I have also wondered what happens to someone, say, who lives on the east coast of the US and is a night owl, if they move to the west coast. With a three-hour time difference, can they keep an earlier sleep/wake schedule, or does the rhythm of daylight gradually reset them to night-owl-hood?

Simply put: Society favors early risers. Think no further than phrases like, "The early bird catches the worm."

My favorite rebuttal to that has always been, "The second mouse gets the cheese."

In any case, I know I've been on this subject before, because as a night owl, it's bugged me for a while. Not being a night owl - I love being up at night and sleeping through the boring parts of the day - but the general Puritanical scowling at anyone who doesn't rise with the accursed daystar.

I'm privileged, I know - I'm in a position where I can (usually) sleep when I want and get up when I want. Does it make me healthier? I don't know; I think the exercise does more for that. But it's just possible that I've been able to keep up with daily exercise for a whole year (an absolute record for me) because I'm not fighting an unnatural, for me, sleep schedule.