Night owls' cognitive function 'superior' to early risers, study suggests
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Time of day (or time after waking up per subject) when tests were administered has not been controlled. Cognitive abilities are mediated by wakefulness (not to mention, related for most people, digestive processes) cycle.
If '"Night owls" smarter than morning people' sounds more plausible than 'time since waking up and last meal predictive of cognitive performance' it's time to get one's identity checked. And I can't imagine 'journalists' from thrash like Sky not knowing that, which brings me to the final point: what is this link doing here?
Summer time in winter would mean getting up 1h earlier, in most locations.
EDIT: for those questioning the effect, because “school would still start at the same time (7:45 am)”.
Imagine if we didn’t change 1 hour but instead 12h, and then still says: “why don’t get up? My clock says it’s 7 am!”
We do have biological clocks and ideally these are in sync with our real world clocks.
As long as I can wake up consistently at the same time and not have my sleep schedule destroyed for a couple of weeks twice per year. This clock changing business really messes me up and I see no actual benefit of it today.
Even in summer, I wake just before the beginning of civil twilight.
Needless to say, a late night for me is 10 pm.
I think it's reasonable to assume the school will be starting at roughly the same clock time in all scenarios. That's the entire point of choosing between permanent winter and permanent summer time, isn't it?
So if you extend summer time into the months where the sun is already late to rise, now days that started at a nice hour have to start at the crack of dawn, days that started at the crack of dawn have to start an hour before dawn, and days that started long before dawn get even further before dawn.
What am I missing haha?
In other words, they need that early morning sunlight to help keep a healthy schedule. It's not wasted.
this is the part that I don't get.
So a teenager needs a later schoolday because they're night owls. 100% agreed with that. But why would they need the early morning daylight? They'll sleep that sunlight away anyway!
Wouldn't a shift to a later schoolday, with the DST shift of a later sunrise later, not complement each other very well? Rather than say, just shifting the schoolday later, but then have all that sunlight in the early morning when they are still sleeping.
Not any more: it's better to sleep as much as possible during daylight hours, and spend more of your time outside after the sun has gone down.
The reason for this should be obvious by looking at any current weather report.
But school would start at the same time regardless. They'd still have to show up at 7:45 AM in the summer and the winter. (And 9-5s would still be 9-5s.)
Year-round summer time does mean more daylight to enjoy after work, which would probably be an economic boon to stores and restaurants if it enhances after work leisure.
Are you suggesting that the sun is irrelevant to whether someone is a morning person, and only the time on the clock matters?
That wasn't my original argument at all, but yes - I'll argue this too.
I'm always sleepy in the "mornings" and get my best work done after I've been awake a while. It probably has more to do with metabolic flux than daylight.
I've occasionally worked so hard on things that I've had my schedule "wrap around" the clock, yet I still get the most work done in the back half of my day.
Actually Spain seems far better than England, as the daylight is more in line with sleeping hours. If the sunrise is 7am in Spain when it's 6 am in London.
At the end of the day, time is just a number and we are able to adjust to it changing twice a year with relative ease. If you want to sleep longer, go to bed an hour earlier.
I mean sure changing the clocks for DST is silly and we should stop, but the discussions are almost always really about “everyone hates waking up super early for work and school”. We can fix this without changing our clocks.
Yes I've tried melatonin, morning full-spectrum light therapy (incl sunlight), nighttime blue light filters, exercise, restricted night diet, alcohol + caffeine + sugar abstinence, and more that I'm sure I forgot about. Morning productivity just doesn't work for me. The world isn't made for night owl workers.
Being a vegetarian, the 100gr of protein doesn’t happen on its own, the way it does for many carnivores. I have to pay attention to it, or I end up with 30-50 which isn’t sufficient.
If you mean actual carnivores (mostly eat meat, with some other animal products - eggs, dairy...), that may be right. For most people who are omnivorous, >100g protein per day is not as easy to get, especially since most people's meals are carb-heavy.
It doesn't help that general guidance seems float around 45-55g per day.
> On average, men should eat 55g and women 45g of protein daily. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/should_you_worry_about_h...
> Most adults need around 0.75g of protein per kilo of body weight per day (for the average woman, this is 45g, or 55g for men). https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
I recall when I was younger trying to adopt a "early bird gets the worm" routine. Went to sleep at 9 PM, woke up at 5 AM, drank a coffee, went out in the chill of the morning for a vigorous jog, came back into the apartment, drank another coffee ... then went back to bed and slept like a baby until around 9. Going back on the memory lane, school was a nightmare. With it's start at 8 AM and wake up at 6:30, I mostly spent it in a tormented fuzzy stupor.
Now I kinda accepted there's literally nothing I can do to wake up my brain "on the double". Thanks God for WFH, sleep till 9, start work at 10, I'm almost functional. By noon it's all engines running.
Please try adding two (or potentially three) more supplements:
- 10g of glycine before bedtime
- 5g of creatine per day with a meal
These two along with sufficient magnesium have eliminated my sleep related problems I struggled with for an extended time (most of my life, in fact)
Night people tend to go to bed when they're tired and wake up when they're done sleeping.
Early risers either use an alarm or go to bed / wake up at fixed (i.e. forced) times, mostly due to external constraints.
Is the difference really between scheduled sleep and sleeping when you feel like it?
I've long assumed it's probably due to people who'd do bad things with any sort of useful, "I'd like to go to sleep in the next 15 min, oh and no side effects if the fire alarm goes off in 30 min" kinds of drugs that they aren't a common OTC item.
I had to do it for several years.
I felt like absolute shit every morning. I felt sick and couldn't eat before 10.
Every Day.
I don't have that now I can get up later.
One point in favor of this theory is that even I, a night owl, manage sometimes to wake up before the alarm on the rare days that I do need to wake up early on.
I can rise early without an alarm just by sleeping early.
The stupid article doesn't link the actual paper and I'm lazy to search for it but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a correlation-not-causation situation, since a lot of unskilled work does in fact require rising early while a lot of intellectual work has flexible hours.
except i need to be a certain level of tiredness before falling asleep (i think my adhd affects this - according to all the stuff i read)
but with a little training, i can be a early riser or a night owl - although it's pita to transistion
But I really hope the article isn't measuring people who wake up forcefully.
Having to get up at a time that doesn't suit you due to external constraints is something that can affect anyone.
It's just that early risers get tired earlier (and fast) and then often wake up quickly, fully awake. My brother has always been like this.
I'm a night owl. I get tired more slowly, go to bed later, and take a while to fully wake up too.
It seems to me there is a difference in metabolism as well as the time we get tired. Early birds are like sprinters, fast but short distance. Night owls are more like marathon runners, not so fast but keep going longer. I don't have scientific evidence for this, it's simply how it appears to me.
When I was choosing a secondary school for my son, there was one that pushed "being early" as some kind of moral crusade. Despite evidence that teenagers don't actually work well with that. We did not apply to that school.
Nope.I end up waking up early when I like it or not. so I force myself to go to bed early as i like sleeping. Shame I am not very goo at it.
Jacqui Hanley, head of research funding at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “Without a detailed picture of what is going on in the brain, we don’t know if being a ‘morning’ or ‘evening’ person affects memory and thinking, or if a decline in cognition is causing changes to sleeping patterns.”
My inhibitions & perfectionism slip away, my barriers fall, and the intrepid explorer in me comes out. I can work without constant self review, try things that I would want to consider more deeply in the day. The night is glorious & great.
If you, or anyone else, hasn't heard of it then please definitely look it up. It's a short, quick idea and it's good for helping when I feel like I don't belong somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
EDIT: This is actually a better explanation, I think. Particularly the first paragraph: https://www.verywellmind.com/imposter-syndrome-and-social-an...
It's possible to make it work, you have to be very firm on your boundaries. One option that worked for me was to explain that I can effectively do more timezone coverage despite being in the same Geo-zone.
It also helped to showcase the work I do while they are offline, so when they wake up they see a column of work that has been bounced back across to their plate.
It is definitely hard though, and takes the right crowd who respects you enough to make it work.
It's probably impossible to do this as a CEO though.
For your amusement, a satirical take on "The Hustle" that might also have a little but of uncomfortably-too-real moments for some folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
I often think of David Mitchell's commentary on whether stripes make you look fat: https://youtu.be/ISZyJ5MHApI?si=4_hJVLfsvMWWDXKE
In case you want other mental health tips from the study: "Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol"
I just enjoy to sit in a dark silent room and do things when nothing gets in the way!
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/not-getting-enough...
Working from home and working at night - for me this is the most quiet, energetic and productive time.
For the pure fun of breaking the narrative I found original article, it's here: https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e001000
Time of day (or time after waking up per subject) when tests were administered has not been controlled. Cognitive abilities are mediated by wakefulness (not to mention, related for most people, digestive processes) cycle.
If '"Night owls" smarter than morning people' sounds more plausible than 'time since waking up and last meal predictive of cognitive performance' it's time to get one's identity checked. And I can't imagine 'journalists' from thrash like Sky (Guardian this time) not knowing that, which brings me to the final point: what is this link doing here?
People fall for the clickbait because it tells them something they want to believe. Motivated reasoning is powerful.
(And for those who don't want to believe it, they may read the article anyway because they want to debunk the claim. It's perfect clickbait, targeting potentially 100% of the audience.)