“Humans are normally diurnal creatures”1, which means that we are most active during the daytime and inactive during nighttime. The inactivity often presents itself as sleeping which is crucial to our health. Although we could say that human beings sleep at night, we can’t categorize the sleeping hours into a set timeframe. Some people go to bed at a later hour than the rest. If that’s you, you may call yourself a night owl. If the opposite is true and you often wake up early in the morning, you may be a morning lark. It’s, of course, not black and white, and there is a broad spectrum between being a morning lark and a night owl—but those two are the basis of what we call chronotypes.
For a long time, I thought having a chronotype is like having a zodiac sign. It was fun having a conversation with a friend about how late I stayed up the other night, but I didn’t give any importance to belong to a certain chronotype. After all, you could choose either one and shape your daily routine to adapt to that chronotype, I thought. Well, I was wrong. Neuroscience professor Matthew Walker explains that you don’t get to choose your chronotype as it’s heavily influenced by genetics. There is even research suggesting that some 10% of the population may have mutated genes pushing the midpoint of their sleep cycle by 2 to 4 hours than a regular person whose midpoint is around 4 am.2 Dr. Walker, in his book “Why We Sleep,” even claims that chronotypes might have an evolutionary purpose. When early humans lived in tribes, they couldn’t afford not watching out for predators for eight hours during the night. By having a broader spectrum of sleep cycles, they minimized the time of everyone sleeping at the same time. Establishing chronotypes helped those tribes to survive and pass on their genes.
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Yet, we don’t live in tribes anymore. Especially with the agricultural revolution, society’s needs have changed for the benefit of early risers. The evolution did not catch up to our latest needs. We are stuck with multiple chronotypes while organizing the whole world with the schedule of morning larks. We are unfair to night owls by demanding them to wake up early and get on with their lives. “When night owls are forced to rise early, their prefrontal cortex, which controls sophisticated thought processes and logical reasoning, remains in a disabled, or offline, state,” Dr. Walker writes. “Like a cold engine in an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature.”3 Even with the so-called flexible work hours, we are forcing night owls to start an early day which only sounds like genetically customized torture.
Artist: Gülfemin Buğu Tekcan — cosmodotart
There is interestingly a new hope for people who are not early risers or early birds. A massive survey done in 2007 shows that “sleep and wake times show a near-Gaussian distribution in a given population, with extreme early types waking up when extreme late types fall asleep.”4 Simply put, we cannot define the majority of the human population as morning larks. The hope I mentioned is the possible continuity of the remote-first setup in the workplaces post-pandemic. Companies will provide greater flexibility on people’s wake-up times by not forcing people to come to the office. In the United States, the average one-way commute time was 27.6 minutes in 2019.5 Of course, getting an extra half an hour in the morning helps. Still, it doesn’t solve the problem—as the so-called flexible hours allowing you to start working between 9 am and 10 am instead of starting at 9 am sharp didn’t solve it as well.
A possible next step to help more people adjust their daily routines to their genetic chronotypes is the proper remote-first setups with globalization. When companies and governments don’t force you to live and work from a specific location, then the timezone boundaries will also set loose. You cannot expect two people from Germany and Thailand to work within the same time interval—they’re too far away from each other. Having a proper global setup will push employers to experiment with asynchronous communication. Instead of spending your time in meetings all day, you’ll have to leverage the power of written communication. If you need to communicate synchronously, your chances will be slimmer—but you’ll also be able to get more out of your meetings. People’s time will become much more valuable and respected.
Although the world is moving towards such a future, there are still problems because not all work is digital—thus, we cannot include everyone in this remote-first setup. Most of the population work in the service sector6, which heavily depends on manual labor. Some can be done digitally: I used a notary service using a video call, for example. Some can be automated, but the trend is prolonged—like autonomous parcel deliveries. Some like home repairs are not so easy to consider, even in the long run. However, it’s still in the hands of governments and the private sector to come up with adjusted shifts. There is a lot of effort we need to put into coming up with ideas on improving overall productivity and human wellbeing—which may be the topic of another post.
Whomever you might be, I believe the most important takeaway for you is that the problem is not you. You might be told that you’re lazy because you often slept until noon. Even your closest ones may have called you irresponsible because you’d stay awake until 2 am. The all-knowing state might have forced you to come to school at 8 am while you were practically sleeping inside. However, it is not you. It’s biology. You are wired differently, and you can’t exactly do something about that. Society needs to change—not you. It also begins with you. Don’t force the next generation as you were forced. Fight for your kids’ sleep while the school demands their presence with the early birds. Don’t call people lazy just because their circadian rhythm doesn’t correlate with what society dictates. Redirect the effort from changing yourself to changing your environment by being kinder to other people’s realities. Quality sleep is essential—and it should be available for everyone.
What’s your chronotype? How was your overall experience growing up and in the workplace? Let me know in the comments.
Chronotype on Wikipedia
Mutated Gene Keeps Night Owls Awake by Erik Lief on American Council on Science and Health
Maybe Your Sleep Problem isn’t a Problem by Alex Williams in The New York Times
Epidemiology of the human circadian clock by Till Roenneberg, Tim Kuehnle, Myriam Juda, Thomas Kantermann, Karla Allebrandt, Marijke Gordijn, Martha Merrow from University of Groningen
Census Bureau Estimates Show Average One-Way Travel Time to Work Rises to All-Time High by United States Census Bureau
Around 80% of the United States population works in the service sector. Distribution of the workforce across economic sectors in the United States from 2010 to 2020 by Statista