As I make my way through my second year of high school, I’ve noticed that my productivity increases exponentially as the day goes by. By the time it’s 1-2 a.m., the calculus I’ve stared at all day starts to make sense, and that article I’d been struggling to write seems to write itself. However, when I wake up the next morning, I feel lethargic beyond belief. I’ve experimented with many alarms to encourage wakefulness: Rock music, screeching, and high-pitched beeping—nothing worked. The snooze button doesn’t work either. I have found that there is roughly a 50% chance I will miss the “snooze” button and hit “stop alarm,” meaning that I ultimately wake up 15 minutes before school starts. This is much to the dismay of my first-period teacher, who, after half a school year, is accustomed to seeing me run into class, flushed after having sprinted to school.
As such, I have always classified myself as a night owl: someone who just functions better at night. Historically, I have seen this as a failure on my part, as the general media praises early risers. Social media portrays success as waking up at 5 a.m., working out, making a three-course breakfast, and still having hours of productivity before lunchtime. Even historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Ben Franklin believed that early risers were superior, with Ben Franklin having famously said, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
There has always been a social stigma around night owls. The article Implicit and Explicit Stigma of Chronotype in Emerging Adults reveals that people generally see night owls as significantly lazier, undisciplined, unhealthy, and immature. People automatically assume that night owls only sleep late to be on their phones and that they are consequently uneducated and unproductive. Constantly seeing this stigma around me made me feel like a lazy loser who doesn’t try hard enough. If I made the effort to sleep at 9 p.m. and wake up at 5 a.m., I would be more productive too, right?
Not exactly. While trying to accomplish my goal of listening to 15 podcasts a week and becoming a more knowledgeable person, I stumbled upon the idea of sleep chronotypes. After finishing that particular podcast, everything suddenly made sense, and my definition of a night owl changed. I didn’t feel like my inability to sleep until late at night was my fault anymore. According to the Sleep Foundation, sleep chronotypes are the body’s natural preferences for what times to sleep and be awake. Your sleep chronotype determines when you are most productive, your performance and activity throughout the day, and even your core body temperature.
Furthermore, according to A Genetic Basis of Chronotype in Humans, chronotype is strongly determined by genetics. In other words, being a night owl or morning bird isn’t your fault; these features were determined for you at birth. Some researchers postulate that different sleep patterns evolved as a survival technique for hunter-gatherers, where people would take turns being awake during the night to keep watch. While this may have been helpful two million years ago, modern society is heavily built upon the idea of getting up early and going to bed early. This is especially harmful to night owls, who end up getting insufficient amounts of sleep because of their genetics.
Short-term sleep deprivation that can arise from an unnatural early start leads to increased stress and feeling cranky. However, long-term sleep deprivation can cause and exacerbate several chronic health conditions, including increasing your risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure, and cancer.
Night owls can’t just maneuver around symptoms of sleep deprivation by breaking their sleep up into four hours at night and then napping in the afternoon. According to Eric Suni in Stages of Sleep: What Happens in a Sleep Cycle, the amount of sleep you get is important, but progressing smoothly through the four stages of your sleep cycle can be equally as significant. It seems that there is no compromise for night owls who can’t get enough sleep, because regardless of your genetically determined chronotype, the other 60% of society starts life at 7 in the morning.
No matter what we try to do, the clock that society runs on is the one that everyone must abide by. Society has no right to stigmatize night owls, as chronotypes are determined at birth and don’t make you any less of a person.
