Mia’s been a night owl for as long as she can remember. But she says it’s really over the past several years that her sleep schedule started drifting later and later. These days, her typical bedtime can stretch anywhere from 3:30 a.m. all the way to 6 a.m. She usually wakes up sometime between 12 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.
So what’s Mia doing all night? As it turns out — according to an audio diary she recorded — all kinds of things.
On this particular evening, Mia spent a little over two hours on the phone catching up with a friend, all while getting her steps in on the treadmill. She did some work, connecting with a Ukrainian employee who resides in Poland. She did some dishes and tidying up around the house. And finally, a little after 6 a.m., she went to bed.
In general, Mia seems pretty comfortable with her night owl schedule.
But occasionally, her lifestyle can send her into an existential spiral about how she’s living her life.
“There is a component of, is it a little bit of self sabotaging or am I not optimizing my life enough?” she said. “And could I be more productive if I were more regulated and scheduled — and earlier?”
So about two years ago, Mia decided to make an effort to shift her schedule. She was worried about her focus and memory, and the lack of sunlight in her life, so she went to see sleep doctors. They gave her all the regular advice — limit caffeine; try melatonin; maintain good sleep hygiene (dim the lights, reserve the bed for only sleeping). But there was one recommendation that she struggled with.
“The thing I found harder to do was to stop looking at my phone two hours before going to bed,” she said.
Inevitably, her phone is the last thing she looks at before going to sleep.
“I guess I was hoping there’d be some kind of like magic bullet to shift myself,” she said.
“But it’s been pretty intractable.”
Intractable but not necessarily impossible, as demonstrated by former night owl Harry Guinness.
“I used to think I was a night owl, but that is definitely no longer the case,” he said.
Like Mia, Guinness’ night owl ways began when he was a teenager. In college, he would often stay out into the wee hours partying. After he graduated, Guinness began working as a freelance writer, and found that late at night was the best time to write.
But eventually, he started feeling like he was missing out. Guinness is also a photographer, and likes taking pictures of the sunrise, which, in Ireland, where he lives, can be as early as 4 a.m. He’s also an avid skier, and realized he needed to get up in the morning if he wanted to enjoy the snow — all of which eventually led to his decision that he needed to start going to bed earlier.
“So the intention wasn’t so much to be a morning person,” he said, “the intention was to do the things that morning people can do, and so that then naturally meant that the pressure was on me to become a morning person.”
It wasn’t a quick fix – Guinness says it took him about six years — but the change did stick. In fact, Guinness ended up writing a piece for the New York Times about how he did it.
The article contains plenty of good advice, but Guinness says one behavioral change in particular made the biggest difference.
“No phones in the bedroom at all,” he said. “So me and my partner go to bed at 9 o’clock. We leave our phones out in the living room and I’ll read for an hour and a half. If I’m reading a really good book, I will still stay up until half 12 a.m. But by not having the constant distraction of the phone, by letting myself get sleepy, I can just fall asleep.”
These days, Guinness usually drifts off around 11 p.m. and wakes at 7:30 a.m.
But Guinness added one important caveat to his story — he’s not completely convinced he ever was a true night owl.
“I think I was someone with chronically bad sleep habits, and that’s sort of what made me stay awake till 3 a.m.,” he said, “rather than someone whose natural sleep rhythm would ever have had them going to sleep at that time.”
Which begs the question — who is a true night owl? And what makes them that way?
According to Jamie Zeitzer, a professor at Stanford University in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and co-director of their center for sleep and circadian sciences, the answer is less than clear.
“I wish I had a complete answer, but we don’t know,” Zeitzer said. “It’s genetic, definitely. They’re definitely genetic components to it. There are social and behavioral components to it, but we don’t know what they are.
He says for people who truly function better being up late, there may only be so much they can do to change their innate circadian rhythm.
“We don’t have a lot of control,” Zeitzer said, adding that chronotypes are like rubber bands.
“If you’re a night owl, you can be more of a morning type — but you have to be on it all the time,” he said. “You can’t take a day off. You take a day off, it’s going to snap back to where it wants to be, which is kind of in the night owl position. So… is it flexible? To a degree, but not hugely.”
The problem is, a lot of night owls, like Mia, are constantly getting the message that keeping late hours is terrible for your health. Studies indicate it’s associated with everything from depression and anxiety, to diabetes and heart disease. And even when night owls are getting enough sleep, some of those risks are elevated.
In fact, in a large-scale study that Zeitzer worked on himself, he and his co-authors found that earlier schedules are associated with lower rates of anxiety and depression — regardless of the subjects’ chronotype.
“What we basically showed was that, for the most part, being a morning type was the healthiest, and being an evening type was the least healthy,” Zeitzer said. “Night owls who kept an earlier schedule had better mental health outcomes.
Strikingly, Zeitzer said, even night owls who got less sleep as a result of keeping an earlier schedule had better mental health than night owls getting more sleep, but staying up later.
The question is — why? Zeitzer says it’s unlikely that there’s something fundamentally unhealthy about sleeping when it’s light out, and active when it’s dark. Instead, he suspects that the results are linked to something else — the fact that, at night, people are more likely to be isolated, and to spend their time doing unhealthy things like overindulging in food or alcohol, or sitting around in their pajamas instead of being up and active.
Which begs the question — is it worthwhile for night owls to try to become morning larks?
“I don’t think so,” Zeitzer said. “There are definitely risks of being up late. But I don’t think that waking up earlier for a night owl is necessarily healthier. I just think they need to be careful about the kind of behavior that being up late at night enables.”
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