Night Owls and Early Birds

[Elle]

This is an interesting reflection on some research about night owls and early birds:
Our society is set up to support the morning people and not the other way around, and it has significant effects. I feel this very personally, being a morning person who is dragged into living as a night owl AND early bird by both family and work. One of my kids is a night person and one is a morning person (too soon to call kid 3). My husband is a night owl and I am an early bird. When I first married him I was certain that if we just took about a month to regulate his sleep cycle, everything would be okay and we'd have years of blissful morning-person togetherness forever after. This is Not True. Sure, you can force yourself to live all sorts of different ways, but you can't always change this part of a person's biology.

My husband is lucky that he can work hours that at least most of the time accommodate his preferences. My daughter is not so lucky, and indeed the closer she gets to the ages when ALL kids tend to rise later and need more sleep overall, the more the school system is set up to make her rise at 6 am. It's really difficult for her and every weekend she struggles. She often has to come home and nap, even though that damages her sleep by making her go to sleep even later. You cannot wake her at all sometimes - she is much taller than me and I have struggled to drag her out of bed or into bed when she collapses into sleep elsewhere. Meanwhile, child 2 bounces up like a squirrel on almost exactly the same inner morning person clock that runs my own body. This helps her a lot at school insofar as most of the big stuff gets done first thing in the morning - if there's an exam, that's usually when they have it.

Major exams like the SAT, ACT, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, you name it, are scheduled bright and early and take up an entire morning. Most workplaces, even those with flex schedules, demand people show up early, and both commutes and child care issues push the wake time earlier. Official business in the government starts early in the morning. It's not clear why our society has to run this way - others don't operate on this kind of schedule.

The other aspect of this issue I'm worried about is that we hear a lot of advice about weight loss, diet, etc. and I think it could have a connection to the overall pattern of your days and nights. I've long thought that my sleep and eating habits are linked, and three weeks of experiment recording all of this has only reinforced that impression. You hear that it's better for people to work out early, but WHICH people? Did they test both morning and night people and compare their results? My husband finally jettisoned the conventional wisdom and started going for a 45 minute walk almost every night, instead of trying to exercise when he was "supposed" to. He picked the time of evening - 9 or 10 pm - when he experienced the peak of energy. His weight loss plan succeeded like never before. This is one anecdote but hard to argue with, given the comparisons to other times he has done the same thing with less success, trying to exercise earlier in the day.

I don't think I'm going to be particularly content in some ways until I can live on the schedule I want to. I can remember grousing about this on these boards for years now - sometimes i make progress but there are structural issues that prevent it. No joke, this is a major issue in life. This is not a whimsical choice on my husband's part either - most recently he missed a flight because he was literally incapable of rising at the early hour when he was supposed to, and when I realized and forced him out of bed, he just could not function rapidly enough at that time of day to reach the airport on time. My own sleep is hopelessly screwed up because I can't make my schedule and the kids' schedules work with his schedule and my work, period. Cannot get it done. In some ways it's good to be married to the opposite kind of sleeper because there's always one of you who is up and functioning when things need to be done. Handy with small children issues! But it's also bad for the person who has to alter their normal the most. I've started drinking significant caffeine for other medical reasons (it protects against some neurological problems I would certainly prefer to avoid, if at all possible) and will see if that helps my situation any. I am honestly worried at this point that I might be permanently damaging - or already have permanently damaged - my health with systematic loss of sleep and the inability to live on a morning person schedule. It's like a constant state of low serotonin and that is not good.