Researchers uncover why morning people should not work at night | Hacker News Reader

Researchers uncover why morning people should not work at night

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54 pointsrenafowler22 comments

>The researchers did not find any important differences between the results of the ANT test the early birds and night owls completed in the morning

So the morning people are just as bad as a night person in the morning, and worse at night. Maybe they should revise the headline: Why you shouldn't hire morning people.

>Participants were required to stay awake for 18 hours, from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., and adhere to their normal routine.

That doesn't seem to fit the normal routine of either a night person or a morning person, nor really the opposite. A morning person would be up earlier and asleep later, while the opposite for a night person. Seems a better test would be to have night people stay awake from 0500 to 2300 and morning people stay awake from 1100 to 0500 or something like that and test under those conditions that oppose their natural schedule.

It gets worse:

>>During the week prior to the SWP, participants were required to adhere to their normal routine as much as possible; e.g. have a normal sleep duration (approximately 7.5–8.5 h per day) and maintain regular sleep schedule (e.g. approximate bed time of 11:30 pm ± 60 min, and waking up at approximately 7:30 am ± 60 min each night/morning).

So they forced night people to live on morning people's schedules, but not the other way around. (And yet the night people still performed better!) And the study was only done for one single day, which doesn't seem likely to have any bearing on how people actually perform over a sustained period of time (such as a regular job), but just how they might perform on an occasional holiday like New Year's Eve.

Combined with such a small sample size, this study doesn't really seem to indicate much of anything except that the researchers could potentially have done a better study.

Thing is, night people are forced to follow morning people schedule almost all life long (school, work, etc.). So they are used to wake up (too) early, and since they are night people, they can't sleep in the evening nevertheless. So the "awake from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m." is more or less the rhythm to which they are used (even if it exhausts them). The lazy bunch called morning people are not used to undergo this.

From the article: "Twenty-six volunteers (13 male, 13 female) with an average age of 25 participated in the study"

That's a very small sample size, so I wouldn't put too much confidence in the results before more robust research is done.

26 British, probably white, self-selected, prestigious university students.

The world's most studied population...

I would define the sample and findings "a little more than anecdotal evidence". The actual paper can be found here:

http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/27806/

>Participants were recruited from the general population of the north-east of England through poster advertisements, emails to staff and students of Northumbria University, and through social media.

> ...

> were aged between 18 and 40 years of age

All this reminds me of good old times when I had no kids - we used to debate when to code better and how many hours of sleep someone needs (8 was the minimum apparently).

Then kids happen, and you are lucky to sleep 6 hours, everyone becomes a late night AND morning person at the same time, and write code any time of the day (and actually better, since you start valuing every minute).

I really wish this wasn't so "pro-morning people." The framing should have been "Researchers uncover why late-night people should not work in the morning," since we're the ones being discriminated against by society.

I read this as being unfavorable to morning people: they perform about the same wrt accuracy on tasks in the morning, but worse later in the day.

Also, in the bay area at least the "discrimination" you mention is inverted. I rarely see co-workers in office before 9:30 or so, after I've been at work for over two hours, and I'm almost always the odd one out for things like meetings and organizational items (e.g. team lunches, farewell lunches etc.). "Discrimination" isn't the right word, though.

Maybe true for _some_ software engineers, but I know people here that have to be in the office by 6 AM for sales calls with the East Coast.

Night owls are likely just more accustomed to focusing at night, both with and without a full night's sleep prior. No doubt a morning person could become a night owl with an adjustment period.

That's not what the medical research suggests. You can "force" yourself to follow a different schedule, but your natural chronotype is biologically-determined, so you will never truly adapt.

Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read it!

This seems good: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-j-breus/night-owl-s...

I don't, sorry, maybe try Google?

That's so interesting. I have most definitely flipped from night to morning over the years. Work may have had some steadying influence on that.

Actually, that (EDIT: "an earlier chronotype shift" to be clear) is a normal part of aging.

tl;dr This "finding" of this study: if people take longer to accomplish the same task, they are more accurate in accomplishing the task.

Please spare us from more tiny sample studies.

A tiny sample size can be sufficient if the effect under study is strong.

Is your criticism based on looking at the paper and determining that this is not one of those cases?

What if I'm neither a morning or night person?

I think I may be both. Perhaps I just hate sleeping and would rather be awake and living all the time!

Sometimes I feel like that too. It takes me until the afternoon until my brain is at its peak and I stop functioning around 7pm.

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