Are you someone who wakes up early and feels alert right away, or does your brain hit its stride late at night? Whether you’re a morning lark, a night owl, or somewhere in between, the answer is far more complex than it seems.
According to Dr John Saito from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, this largely depends on what people are in their lives. “When we’re young, we tend to wake up early, and then when we get to our teenage years, we become night owls. Then in middle age, it kind of stabilises until we get to our senior years. When we become morning larks again because our melatonin levels decrease,” he told Popular Science.
Meanwhile, the 2009 research “Adolescent Changes in the Homeostatic and Circadian Regulation of Sleep”, published in the National Library of Medicine, shows that the body clocks change between the ages of 10 and 30 mainly due to hormonal changes. Our chronotype, which is the human’s natural inclination to the times of day when they prefer to sleep or stay alert or energetic, remains the same to some degree.
What shapes your sleep chronotype?
It is our genes, age, environment, and lifestyle factors which determine our individual chronotype. According to the 2019 research paper Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provide insights into circadian rhythms published in Nature Communications, there are 351 genetic factors influencing whether a person prefers to be a morning lark or night owl.
People seem to sleep more in winter as they are exposed to less natural light. People in cities are more exposed to artificial light, which can alter the sleep-wake cycle of our body. The factor of how close you are to the equator can affect your chronotype. Sleep patterns are also hereditary, said Saito.
Clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Dr Michael Breus believes that chronotypes are spread over a larger spectrum. “While the traditional categories are ‘morning lark’ and ‘night owl,’” said Saito. “Breus then breaks these broad categories down further.”
The four chronotypes
Clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Dr Michael Breus believes that chronotypes fall on a larger spectrum. “While the traditional categories are ‘morning lark’ and ‘night owl,’” said Saito.
“Breus then breaks these broad categories down further.” He categorises human chronotypes into four distinct types: Lion, Bear, Wolf, and Dolphin.
Lions are early risers who are at their most productive in the morning and early afternoon. They constitute about 15-20 per cent of the adult population, wrote Dr Breus in Psychology Today.
Bears’ chronotypes stick to a solar schedule. They are most productive during the middle of the day, from late morning through early afternoon. They form 50 per cent of the population.
Wolves have peaks in productivity in the late morning and again in the late evening. About 15-20 per cent of the population are Wolves. Dolphins are tired during the day and wired with restless, nervous energy at night. Dolphins are light and restless sleepers with low sleep drives, who tend to wake up frequently during the night. About 10 per cent of the population are dolphins, says Breus.
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