Not a Morning Person? Here is who to blame.
You stumble out of bed, bleary eyed and only one resonating thought: coffee. You space out on the way to work, seemingly forgetting the drive in your haze. Enter the tortuous place (commonly known as work) that is responsible for this fog.
If you are like the overwhelming majority of the population, you fit into this category rather than the chipper, happy to be alive, seize the day, almost alien-like other category: morning people.
What is with these people? Where does their energy come from? Where does their will to live reside and how are they so happy at 8:00am?
The truth is that I’m envious. I want to know their secret, so I decided to get some answers. Is it my fault that I hate the world early in the morning? Or are there factors outside of my control when I unleash on innocent and unsuspecting bystanders with my anger in the morning? What I found out is that it is a mixture of both. The morning person vs. night owl fits in quite well to the nature vs. nurture debate:
NATURE: Genetic research is beginning to show that some of this debate is rooted within our genes. Our hypothalamus (the same part of the brain responsible for hunger and thirst) affects our body clocks as well. Our internal body clocks are innately connected with the time you prefer to wake up or how well (in my case, poorly) you respond to sleep deprivation.
NURTURE: However, most research shows that environmental factors still have the biggest effect on this. Do you get the proper amount of sleep each night? Do you eat foods that keep you up at night or allow anxiety to interrupt your sleep patterns? Were you brought up in a household that supported the early to bed early to rise mentality? I like to blame my mother for bringing me up in a night owl household; she goes to bed after 1:00am every night and refuses to get up before 9:00am. Oh yeah, and she contributed to my genes as well.
As I finish up this blog at 12:30am and feel the impending dread of the 7:00am alarm clock, I can't decide who to blame (besides my mother, but she is too easy of a target). The mixture of my family history of night owls and mean morning personalities coupled with my inability to slow down before midnight leaves me feeling that I will just never be a natural morning person.
Thus the vicious cycle continues for me. What about my fellow night owls? Who do you blame? And morning people, don’t be shy to chime in with your tricks of the trade.
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Lauren Kleinman
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Reader Comments (6)
I should really buy stock in Pepsi, since I probably contribute about 50% of their gross revenue. :-)
I think the key is to figure out when your most productive hours are -- mine are early in the morning and then after 6 PM in the evening, which means I can do either late or early shifts, but am completely useless from lunch into the afternoon.
I am very much a Lark. When I am trying to "sleep-in" on a day off, I am almost always up and around by 6am. I am also at my most creative in the morning. I can only handle routine tasks after lunch. I also get a secondary burst of creativity in the evening, which can sometimes be extended until the wee hours. I have structured my working day to take advantage of this natural rhythm: creative problem solving or design work in the mornings, mundane paperwork in the after noon. I find it works much better since I started doing it this way. I feel better, I do a better job for my employer, and my clients/customers get a better product.
@Ben-I am also living with a night owl...who consumes the other 50% of the available Pepsi supply. We each keep our own internal schedules and make sure the overlap time is spent together. Not a perfect system, but I think he is worth a bit of inconvenience.
@Joan- I am so curious about this theory of when someone was born. If you are born in the morning, does research (or just theory) show that you are a morning person and vice versa? This would explain me being a night owl as I came into this world around 6:00pm!