Early Riser or Night Owl? New Study May Help To Explain the Difference (nih.gov) 79
Some people are early risers, wide awake at the crack of dawn. Others are night owls who can't seem to get to bed until well after midnight and prefer to sleep in. Why is this? An NIH-funded team has some new clues based on evidence showing how a molecular "switch" wired into the biological clocks of extreme early risers leads them to operate on a daily cycle of about 20 hours instead of a full 24-hour, or circadian (Latin for "about a day"), cycle. From a report: These new atomic-level details, shared from fruit flies to humans, may help to explain how more subtle clock variations predispose people to follow different sleep patterns. They also may lead to new treatments designed to reset the clock in people struggling with sleep disorders, jet lag, or night-shift work. This work, published recently in the journal eLIFE, comes from Carrie Partch, University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and the University of California, San Diego. It builds on decades of research into biological clocks, which help to control sleeping and waking, rest and activity, fluid balance, body temperature, cardiac rate, oxygen consumption, and even the secretions of endocrine glands. These clocks, found in cells and tissues throughout the body, are composed of specialized sets of proteins. They interact in specific ways to regulate transcription of about 15 percent of the genome over a 24-hour period. All this interaction helps to align waking hours and other aspects of our physiology to the 24-hour passage of day and night. In the latest paper, Partch and her colleagues focused on two core clock components: an enzyme known as casein kinase 1 (CK1) and a protein called PERIOD. Clock-altering mutations in CK1 and PERIOD have been known for many years. In fact, CK1 was discovered in studies of golden hamsters more than 20 years ago after researchers noticed one hamster that routinely woke up much earlier than the others. It turns out that the timing of biological clocks is strongly influenced by the rise and fall of the PERIOD protein. This daily oscillation normally takes place over 24 hours, but that's where CK1 enters the picture. The enzyme adjusts PERIOD levels by chemically modifying the protein at one of two sites, thereby adjusting its stability. When one site is modified, it keeps the protein protected and stable. At the other site, it leaves it unprotected and degradable.
Oh yeah, that's it (Score:1, Troll)
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Maybe... just maybe... there are multiple factors, and the lifestyle choices are only a subset.
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No doubt, i have fallen into a night owl routine and fixed it by setting the alarm early. Sure it's uncomfortable at first but your body adjusts and you can get to sleep earlier. It seems popular now to justify just about any behavior......
Nope. For some that works, but not for everybody. I, for example do not adjust. I just get more and more tired. Yes, I tried and tried really hard. Repeatedly. It is people like you that do not understand. On the plus side, If you are an extreme owl (my natural day length is about 27 hours, and I have to let it "wrap" occasionally to stay healthy) and find ways to stop raping your body with an unnatural sleep pattern, your productivity is not impacted.
Of course, early raisers are not more productive than la
Re: Oh yeah, that's it (Score:1)
I wish it was that easy... I suffered a brain injury in 1997 and my internal clock likes 8 a.m. or later to go to sleep... I've stayed up at least 48 hours trying to reset my clock but it never has worked for me... Even with sleeping meds it's frequent that I can't sleep at night...
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Gosh, it's that easy? How long does it take to adjust?
A year? Two? Five? Six? Eight? Ten? No matter how long I did it or how consistently, it NEVER became easier to me. No caffeine at night, no partying. Just suffering every day.
So my sample size of one contradicts your sample size of one.
All your experience means is that you weren't a hard-set night owl. Your experience doesn't apply to everyone else. The science here isn't just recording feelings like a bad psychology study; there are actual, m
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I've been a night owl since I was too young for alcohol, caffeine, drugs, or phone/computer addiction to be factors.
Re:Oh yeah, that's it (Score:4, Insightful)
Not the alcohol, caffeine, legal or illegal drugs, stress, phone/computer addiction.... that doesn't have anything to do with it of course. ;)
Do those things keep you awake. Or do you do those things because you are awake.
Which way does the causality go?
Night owl here - wish we had a 27 hour day (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always been a night owl, and I've also frequently said I felt like I would be happier operating on a 27-hour day: 18 hours awake, 9 hours of sleep more or less. On a couple of different occasions in my life when totally free from outside obligations, I've had my sleep schedule drift completely around the clock within the span of a week, going to bed roughly 3 hours later every day. Even on weekends and holidays, if I'm allowed to sleep in a little bit I end up staying up multiples of that amount the next night.
In short, I'm not surprised at all there's something like this going on. I'd never considered the flip side, that early risers might be on a short schedule, but at a gut level that seems to fit.
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Yep. I don't have it quite that bad, but during the week I have a lot of 5.5- to 6.5-hour nights. I mean, I realize a lot of people do that normally just because they're busy or don't need that much sleep, but I definitely recognize that I'd be happier with 8. But the way I feel is the day simply isn't done after 16 hours, and a lot of times I'm at my most alert and creative in late evenings.
Then I sleep in on weekends to catch up, stay up too late because I slept in, and by Monday morning I've already lost
Re:Night owl here - wish we had a 27 hour day (Score:5, Interesting)
> by Monday morning I've already lost all the gains from the weekend.
Not really. Sleep debt is cumulative, and paying off the "principal" requires actual deep sleep. When you're hopelessly and chronically sleep-deprived, you need to pay that debt any way you can before the metaphorical interest eats you alive. Limiting your sleep on weekends to "maintain a normal sleep schedule" is shooting yourself in the foot.
Imagine you're a marathon runner who gets a sprain while training for a marathon. You can shoot up the injury with steroids to reduce the inflammation and make it hurt less, or you can give it a couple of days to heal. Getting up early on weekends for the sake of "maintaining a consistent schedule" is like continuing to run while taking mass quantities of ibuprofen & injecting the injured foot with steroids to reduce inflammation. You might be able to run, but you're ultimately making the injury even WORSE.
A better and more sustainable strategy, if you can negotiate it, would be to work a nominal half day on Wednesday (coming in when everyone else is returning from lunch... in reality, just missing 3 hours in the morning) and make it up by working later. That way, you'll be going into Wednesday 100% rested and at your peak.
You'll probably be going in on Monday and Thursday on 4-5 hours of sleep... but a night of sleep deprivation when you're fully rested previously is no big deal. But you already know that, because right now, Monday is probably your best day of the week. Sleeping late on Wednesdays just makes Wednesday even better than Monday, and makes Thursday as good as Monday. Tuesday and Friday will be worse than Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but Tuesday will be no worse than it ever was, and you'll go from sleepwalking half-dazed through Friday to having Friday be no worse than Tuesday. If you're allowed to work from home (not necessarily in lieu of putting in 40 hours of face-time at the office, but in addition), you can work a few hours from home at night when you're at your peak to compensate, and nobody will even KNOW that you're limping through Tuesday and Friday.
The catch is... HR... because this goes against everything they view as normal. I've gotten absolutely dumbfounded looks from HR people, because they're USED to people asking to work a half a day once or twice a week... but in THEIR universe, "working half a day" always means "leaving EARLY". They just can't wrap their heads around why someone, on a day like a Friday of a holiday weekend when everyone is told they can work a half day, would prefer to come in after lunch and work until 7 instead of coming in at 9 and starting the weekend at noon. Anyone who's a sleep-deprived night person, on the other hand, "gets it" instantly... it means you'll actually be rested and ready to have fun on that Friday night, instead of crashing and burning into sleep-deprived exhaustion like you always do... AND you'll actually get real, productive work done on that Friday, instead of sleepwalking through the day.
Institutional inertia is the hardest thing of all to overcome. In the grand scheme of things, coming in at 1pm on Wednesday (instead of coming in at 9, and going to lunch for an hour at noon) is a relatively minor accommodation... but to the HR mindset, it's utterly alien and bizarre. Getting HR to agree to hours like 10-6 might be a tiny bit easier, just because it makes more sense to them. But really, "sleep late on Wednesday" is probably the ideal compromise when your job requires you to keep otherwise-normal business hours IF you can get HR to go along with it. That said, 10-6 is good too, if only because that extra hour of sleep is REALLY more like 90 minutes, since traffic tends to rapidly clear up after 9am.
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Thanks for this.
I've been a 9PM-4AM mostly since around the age of 9. My wife doesn't understand why I'm so tired on days after messing with this pattern (I wake up at 4AM or before, no matter what, when I fall asleep is irrelevant). 6 hours is generally enough. Generally.
Naps help a lot (the craziest dreams) but it takes the longer period of sleep avoid zombie mode.
Note: I avoid caffeine most days, maybe tea at 6AM once a week (on the hard days).
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Exactly this. I'm both more creative and stronger at night. I've tried going to the gym early, but I can't get a good workout in. I'm just weaker. By a noticeable amount. I also tend to have a better flow of ideas when I'm drawing at night.
Night owl - 24 hour day here (Score:2)
Night owl since as long as I can remember. And have noticed the same effect, but very weak: 24-hour cycle works fine.
In my case, it's best described as a delay (so not the period, but phase of the clock). For example the effect of daylight is similar as for other people. When 'outside goes dark', and people feel sleepy some hours after, the same happens to me but later. After going to sleep, an X number of hours later people wake up (or because their eyes catch light from outside), the same happens to me
Re: Night owl - 24 hour day here (Score:2)
The ever-expanding Daylight Savings Time doesn't help either. I really don't need sunlight at 9:30 PM. The extra heat at bedtime doesn't help falling asleep either.
It reminds me of seeing the midnight sun in the Arctic circle. Except I'm in Texas, and it's because of a stupid law, not the geography. DST is worse in hotter climates because you are dealing with 1 more hour of heat at bedtime... It also limits my outdoor activity. I'd rather run in the dark at 90 degrees than in the daylight at 100 degrees.
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came here to say this. i also wonder if being forced to operate outside of our natural sleeping patterns are the /cause/ of depression.
Yes, I had the opportunity of living in Finland for some years. The article talks about alignment to the '24 hour passing cycle' of day and night. While the Summers are beautiful in Finland and daylight quite lengthy. The Winter can be quite harsh with minimal daylight and for some days / weeks none at all. IIRC Finland had (maybe still) one of the highest rates of depression in Europe. Back then my employer would bring out special lamps that mocked sunlight, you were asked to take a couple 15 minute breaks
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If I typed as fast as I thought , 'yes there are adjustments but the fails to mention any of these factors.'
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FTFY
I think you may need some more sleep!
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I have a fairly intransigent non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder, with a free-running period of 25.5 hours, which I once maintained for over a year.
In my twenties, before the condition was full blown, I started to lapse into 24–28 hour waking periods followed by 12–16 hours asleep. It was easy enough to do two of these in a row, but not so easy to keep it going beyond that.
Despite having free-run at 25.5 hours for more than a year, I was never able to function normally in the deep night hours,
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Same here, also about 27 hours. If I get up the same time every day, I get deep into jet-lag after about 10 days or so. Fortunately, I found a job where my contribution is so valuable that nobody minds. I also work 95% from home. The occasional customer-meeting or one or two fixed-time activities per week are not a problem, but raising at the same time every day is a massive productivity killer and has significant negative health impact.
I don't believe this is correct (Score:1)
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My own self-study with a sample size of one contradicts your self-study with a sample size of one.
The science done in this field suggests that people with different factors (genetic and potentially other) have different levels of adaptability in this.
Hogwash.... (Score:2)
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Because there are other factors. You stay up long enough to match the solar cycle, so you begin your sleep cycle at a specific time that works for you and you wake when your sleep cycle ends. A shorter circadian rhythm (and the start-high/end-low cycle that accompanies it) means it's easier to sleep at the end of the day to stay synchronized with the solar cycle.
You are criticize of the science, but you prove that you aren't familiar enough with it to criticize.
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Who makes up this 'science'?
The people who think "our planet has operated on a 24-hour clock for the entire span of evolutionary time." Pretty basic mistake for someone studying circadian rhythms.
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Since the length of the day has been very slowly getting longer, is the night owl type a newer adaption? And since the length of the day has been over 23 hrs a day for ~300 million yrs, it's not really much of a mistake.
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since the length of the day has been over 23 hrs a day for ~300 million yrs, it's not really much of a mistake.
Other than hamsters, the main example that was compared to humans was algae. At the time of our last common ancestor, ~1.5 billion years ago, it was less than 18 hours per day. That still doesn't cover the "entire span of evolutionary history". I know I'm being pedantic, but they were wrong.
Does this molecular switch change over time? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a night owl until sometime between 40 and 45 years of age. These days (I'm 50), by 8 PM I'm getting tired, and by 10 PM there's simply no point in trying to stay awake any longer even if I want to. But I still only sleep 6-7 hours per night (which is actually up by an hour or so compared to what it was then I was younger), so I wake up at 4-5 AM. I set my alarm for 6 AM, but I'm almost always awake and doing something by the time it goes off.
I've also noticed that all-nighters, or even anything close, are no longer remotely productive for me. I get tired and no amount of caffeine will keep my brain working. Better to go to bed and hit it in the morning. If I need a few extra hours to meet a deadline, I'm better off getting up two or three hours earlier than trying to stay up late.
I've often wondered what changed. I'm older, obviously, but what specifically?
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I've often wondered what changed. I'm older, obviously, but what specifically?
Well your body clock: young kids are morning people, it normalises a bit, then in adolescence it tends to swing very late, then is starts drifting earlier and earlier. Old people tend to be very early risers. I used to be a major night owl. I'm still one but less so.
Biology is complicated. It seems there's no one thing that controls circadian rhythm.
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Micro-stroke or something like that?
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Micro-stroke or something like that?
There's no evidence of anything like that. Just one month I liked to stay up late and the next I found it really hard to.
Phase Locked Loop (Score:2)
(Showing my age) It really reminds me of working on TV sets. Sunrise is the sync signal, those that run fast wait for it, those that run slow (night owls) miss it.
The early bird catches the worm (Score:3)
'The early bird catches the worm' just shows that the worm should have stayed in bed.'
-- Lazarus Long, Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein
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Total BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Treatments for insomnia (Score:2)
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CK1 and PERIOD (Score:3)
Some days the jokes just write themselves.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I saw an article about this a few years back, and since then I have met two people that lived that way. Got to sleep, wake up in the night, think about things and maybe work some problems out, fall asleep again. Some times they even got up and worked a bit until they got sleepy.
I think they should tell people: If you wake up at night, it does not mean you have to -stay- up. 8-)
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My wife calls it "nap time".
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Wikipedia agrees:
And what of us who do both? (Score:2)
I'm usually up until 2am and then back up and running at a quarter of 5
Then I apparently operate on a 32h cycle. (Score:2)
When I go to bed when tired, and wake up naturally, without any alarms or clocks, I naturally fall into a 32h cycle.
Which really sucks in winter close to the arctic, when you miss the sun for weeks without interruption. (Mainly because life prevents the cycle from "going round".)
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That is a bit extreme. I am on 27h and I do sync to the normal day-cycle for a few days after a wrap-around. But after 5 days or so, it drifts again.