The Tyranny of Morningness

On the experience of Night Owls in a Morning World

Feb 28, 2024

I have never in my life been mistaken as a morning person. Even as a child, despite chronotypes1 leaning towards morningness in early life, I remember relishing Saturday mornings for the luxury of sleeping in until 9am or 10am, and there might have been more than one occasion in which my parents left me behind to go to church because I just couldn’t get up and get ready on time.

My sister, on the other hand, was a morning person. Not an EARLY, early morning person, but one nonetheless. So that’s how I knew I was different, and that’s also how I came to the realization that you are what you are, and there’s not much that will significantly change that.

My quaint little observations in life turned out to be backed by science. Chronotypes are hereditary2 affecting everything from preferred sleep and wake times, appetite, exercise, and productive periods within the day. There are natural variations and shifts by age—for example, the chronotype in teens will shift later, but then as you age, it shifts earlier again—but for the most part, you can’t really change your inherited chronotype anymore than you can change your eye color.

I know, I know…you became a morning person when you had children! Or you read this book that convinced you to be a morning person, and lo and behold…you are now! I don’t buy it. You might need to convince yourself that’s true to maintain sanity in raising your kids or adhering to early morning trading hours for your job, but if nature took back your life with no more forcing factors, I bet within a year or two, you’d drift back to your genetic dispositions.

The chronotype spectrum

Your chronotype is on a spectrum, and though it is largely determined genetically, it can also be shaped by other factors, such as the daylight hours of your geographical location. But in general, there are a few big chronotype categories:

Morning larks (roughly 15% of the population): these are the hard-core morning people, up by 5am, at their desks by 7 or 8am, but crashing in the afternoon hours, in bed by 9pm.
Daylight followers (55%): these are individuals whose sleep cycles tend to follow sunrise and sunset, waking up at a (more reasonable) 7am, productive in the mid-day hours, but to bed by 10 or 11pm.
Night owls (15%): like me, they tend to prefer waking up no earlier than 9am, are most productive in the afternoon/early evening, and go to bed at midnight, if not later.
Spanners and insomniacs (10%): because there are always exceptions, there are some individuals who can function fine on either end of the spectrum, and there are also those who just don’t like to sleep at all—going to bed late, waking up early, otherwise known as elite sleepers3, legitimately needing less than six hours of sleep a night!

You know who you are, deep down inside. Just as you know whether or not you like cilantro/coriander or whether you can smell asparagus in your pee4. This is why I am enraged when I stumble on articles like this:

It’s exactly like the irony of genetically fit people serving as personal trainers to people who are not genetically inclined towards athleticism: “It’s easier than you think!” For you, it’s easy. For the rest of us, it’s not.

The evolutionary need for different chronotypes

If we refer back a mere 12,000 years to the hunting/gathering ages of humanity, it’s easy to see why having people across the chronotype spectrum would have been advantageous to survival. You needed the morning people up before the crack of dawn to restoke the fire, prepare for the day, get things going. Then, you needed the daylight followers to come to speed at dawn to join the forces of hunting, gathering, and doing the survival stuff. Finally, you needed the night owls to take the late shift, alert with attention to guard the camp, keep the fire going for warmth, and ensure the continuity of necessary operations until the morning.

It’s in this context that my eveningness makes perfect sense. For starters, I am never hungry in the morning. After waking, I do need coffee pretty immediately, but I’m quite happy to go without food until noon. If I were on the night guard shift, after waking in the morning, breakfast would already be gone, so getting food immediately would be unlikely. Commensurately, my hunger peaks in the evening. This is my most substantial meal of the day, and it’s the one I enjoy the most. As the night guard, it would have been important to get a hearty meal to keep me going deep into the night.

I am also an easy sleeper. I can sleep with daylight streaming through the windows, I can fall back asleep easily after various disturbances. I can sleep in cars, on trains, in airplanes, on a cold, hard floor. When I was younger5, I could drink caffeine at midnight and go straight to bed. All of this makes perfect sense in the hunter-gatherer life. There are no black-out curtains6 to shield the sun, and with plenty of activity and noise swirling around, the night owls needed to be hearty, easy sleepers to get in their sleep after the night shift.

When I work out, my preference is strongly to do so in the evenings. In fact, working out in the morning is negatively correlated with my body’s ability to recover7. This also makes sense because, as a guarder of the night, I would have needed to physically peak in the evenings to chase away predators and bring in the wood to keep the fire going.

My peak brain power, not surprisingly, is in the afternoon and early evenings, and my creativity is off the charts at night. Again, mentally peaking later in the day was a survival necessity.

The inevitable devaluation of night owls in modern society

Alas, when farming replaced hunting and gathering, the need for night owls plummeted. All hands were needed to plough the fields, sow the seeds, and harvest the bounty. Daylight hours were sacred, and more permanent housing reduced or eliminated the need for nighttime vigilence.

The industrial revolution quickly followed to issue in a completely new and much more rigid feature: shifts. Assembly line work necessitated everyone being on the line at the same time, taking breaks at the same time, and shutting down at the same time. If you were lucky, you got a shift that corresponded with your chronotype. But I am sure these kinds of negotiations rarely took place, and anyway, most of the shifts were scheduled from 7-to-3 or 8-to-4 or 9-to-5.

Corresponding with the industrial revolution was a rather puritanical wave of religion that valued conscientiousness, diligence, and—you guessed it—a strong emphasis on the divinity of morningness.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

This even shows up in a Polish proverb8:

“Kto rano wstaje, temu Pan Bóg daje” [the one who gets up early, gets rewarded by God]

This (evolutionarily) “new” value of morningness and devaluation of eveningness didn’t and couldn’t immediately change the deep genetic wiring across the human species. It takes time—lots and lots and lots of time—for certain traits to obtain dominence or for others to recede and eventually fall away from a species. But society is doing a damn good job of trying to speed that up.

In the United States, schools have staggered start times. In general, elementary schools start the latest, and 93% of high schools start before 8:30am9. When I was in high school (in the early 1990s), our start time was 7:20am. That is seared into my memory. I remember all too well getting up at 5:45am when it was still dark, bumbling through a shower, forcing down cereal for breakfast, and then somehow coming into consciousness around 3rd or 4th period when my brain finally and fully woke up.

All of this defies logic (and science): younger children naturally wake up earlier, and yet they are blessed with later start times. Meanwhile, the poor teens in high school not only need more sleep, but they also have chronotypes leaning towards later hours, meaning they are constantly battling their natural circadian rhythms to adhere to the grossly early start times.

College and graduate schools are a little better: there is choice. Aside from a few required courses that were scheduled at 8am Monday/Wednesday/Friday, I could shape my schedule with much more agency. In fact, once I was in graduate school, I had almost complete control over my schedule.

In my 3rd and 4th years of graduate school, most of my coursework was complete. I spent my days in various labs. I ran a research lab for my assistantship, and the subjects were school-aged children, which meant all of the work had to be done in afterschool hours. I also ran research for my thesis and dissertation with college student participants, which I could schedule for whatever hours suited me. There was a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of work in the library, all of which could be done at practically any hour of the day.

All of this added up to the freedom of building the most natural schedule that worked for me. I did most of my reading and writing in the evening, after dinner and well into the early morning (typically 2 or 3am, but this tended to drift later and later, as is typical with Night Owls who run on a circadian rhythm longer than 24 hours10). I’d get up (temporarily) around 7am, get my daughter ready for school and onto the bus, and then climb back into bed. I’d sleep until 11am or noon, then get up, into the lab, and plow through research activities until time to pick up my daughter. We’d eat dinner, have some play time, and then once she was in bed, back to the writing and reading and studying. In one word, BLISS. I could access the best of my brain power and creativity for the first time in my life.

Then, I eventually hit the real world. I worked for a small company that was, for its time, on the progressive side: we had casual Fridays in which we could wear jeans to work, and rather than dictating a work schedule, we had the “luxury” of declaring our work hours, with the caveat of starting no later than 9:30am and requiring daily adherance to said schedule. Because I lived in a more affordable community, that still meant I needed to get up no later than 7am (6:30 if there was traffic, which there always was) to factor in the commute.

Of course I could do this, and I did do it. I sucked it up during the week, and I made up for it by sleeping in on the weekends. But chronically ignoring and defying your hard-wired sleep takes a toll.

The price we pay as night owls

Morning people are happier. They have less risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, depression, and other psychiatric disorders. Night owls are more prone to smoking and drinking, along with other addictions, including caffeine. They get less exercise.

Also: higher ice cream sales are related to higher incidents of drownings. That doesn’t mean that ice cream causes drownings.

Correlation does not mean causation. Higher temperatures in the summer lead to both higher sales of cooling ice cream treats and people seeking the cool waters of lakes, rivers, and beaches, which leads to a higher incidence of drownings. Morning people report higher life satisfaction and they have schedules that predispose them to getting up early. Early wake up times don’t cause higher life satisfaction or better health outcomes.

For example, in the world of work demanding early mornings, night owls might:

Pick up a quick, less nutritious breakfast and/or lunch to make up for sleeping in as late as possible
Forego morning workouts (get up even earlier?? hell no…) and have less time to work out at night due to family and social demands
Seek jobs that are more aligned with their sleep needs (read: restaurant jobs, bars, and entertainment) many of which are associated with excess alcohol, food, and other vices
…all of which may lead to less than desired health outcomes.

Another pernicious side effect of morning-person biases is the “advice11” we are constantly bombarded with:

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! (or, my other favorite: eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper)
Morning exercise is better for you!

All of this rubbish is based on poorly designed, longitudinal and correlation-based studies: morning people have less incidence of obesity; they also tend to eat big breakfasts. Thus, be like the morning people and eat a big breakfast - you will lose weight! Like most nutritional advice, this is based on bad logic, and also, one size does not fit all.

We know now that fasting intermittently12 (i.e., skipping breakfast entirely) can have positive health effects. We also know that evening exercise can contribute to better sleep, amongst other health benefits. The problem is that, when 85% of the population function as morning people (and morning people are correlated with better health benefits), most of the research is going to point to habits aligned with morning people. Thus, this advice might actually be unhelpful or even harmful for the other 15% of us.

Full circle to an always-on world

Despite morningness being fully baked into work schedules, expectations of normalcy, and our general ways of life, we find ourselves in an interesting moment of time. Since the earliest days of the 21st century, we have become a truly global society. We can travel within a single day to the other side of earth. We can instantly connect with anyone on any inch of the planet. Digital products are always on, the storefront never shuts down.

With the COVID pandemic placing a big exclamation point on people working with each other whenever and wherever they happened to be, it’s clear we now have green pastures for opening up our mindset to the vast diversity of chronotypes in our workforce. Currently, I live and work in the UK, and I am thrilled to have a client primarily based in the US. None of my calls start before noon, and I’m quite happy to work into the evening with them. We once had to schedule a call for midnight (UK time); I had to practically beg them to stop apologizing. I would have gladly traded all of the 8am calls over the years to ones starting at midnight!

The problem is, we are still ascribing a moralistic and achievement angle to morning risers (people who sleep in are lazy! the best leaders get up at 3am to start their days!). Thus, there’s an added element of shame for night owls. I’ve always been quite vocal about my night tendencies. I always figured, if people know I hate mornings, perhaps they’ll take that into account on occasion. Better to get my sleep than to swallow my pride. Invariably, people express appreciation for this and remember it. Apparently, I’m one of the few in this world actually admitting to being a night owl!

This needs to change. We should be having conversations around when we are at our best, and how we want to use our precious time for the biggest impact. There are so many jobs that actually require evening or night shifts, and we should be recruiting night owls actively for these (and paying for them handsomely for it—we are in the minority, after all!). Just like I would never want a life of early morning work, I’m sure that morning people equally suffer on night shifts.

Moreover, we have so much opportunity to give people optionality in their hours of operation, given our global landscape. Sure, some of our work needs to be in collaboration with others, but a lot of it can be done asynchronously as well. This is a “free” flexibility option available in the corporate world, and I’ve no idea why this is so rare for companies to offer. Recognizing the unique needs of night-biased chronotypes would contribute greatly to their wellness and health.

I’m finishing this article after 10pm, fully alert and excited to put the finishing touches on it, as clear-headed as when I started it at noon today. This is not to brag at all; this is simply a statement of fact. Just as the morning people tout their morning rituals of divine meditation and productivity, this is my way of fighting back to say, I can do that, too. But in my own time.

Share this post with your favorite night owl. Or leave a comment of solidarity.

Counter-Intuition with Julie Clow

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