I can tell you're my chronotype.

Your genes predetermine your morningness + eveningness, and fighting it could kill you.

Here's how to understand and manage it to optimise performance for you and your team.

Your body's internal clock sets when you are sleepy, alert. and most active. This timetable is called your CHRONOTYPE, and there's no known way to reset it.

So when someone says the great + the good are all early risers (see notes 1+2 to feel grim), thankfully that could be more correlation than causation.

Although we cannot tinker with our chronotypes, we know some factors such as gender (women usually having an earlier chronotype) and age (adolescence drives the chronotype later, and it slowly reverses across adulthood) can have an influence.

Not to be confused with ...

The CIRCADIAN RHYTHM on the other hand is a regular curve that maps your sleep-wake cycle. Unlike the chronotype, your circadian rhythm can be manipulated and trained.

Factors that affect my circadian rhythm

• Exposure to light / darkness toggles the release of melatonin, inducing sleep.

• Shift work + irregular sleep hours.

• Stress + anxiety + worry.

• Routine + habit.

• Exercise.

• Medication + hormones.

Therefore whilst your chronotype determines when your circadian cycle starts and ends in the course of the day, this shouldn't have a direct impact on whether you are sleep-deprived:

The above diagram shows the difference in circadian rhythms for a morning person (lark) vs a night person (owl).

What does it mean to me?

Morning larks and night owls are the most common analogies for morningness or eveningness, but there is a whole raft of lesser known animals that represent the spectrum in between.

It's a jungle out there

Lion: another term for the morning bird. Focusses well in the morning, but fades in the evening.

Swift: wakes early + sleeps late, but see bursts of energy in the morning + late evenings.

Bear: ploughs on through the day into the night - represents 55% of the population.

Woodcock: Wakes late + sleeps early, with peak performance in late mornings + early evenings.

Wolf: aka the night owl - only 15% of the world falls in this group.

Dolphin: The insomniac that stays alert even in "sleep".

As a gross generalisation, morning people tend to be more conscientious + nice. They are reliable + disciplined, and often do well at school or in managerial roles.

Owls on the other hand lean towards creativity + impulsiveness + risk-taking, and are more likely to fall into deep dark obsessive rabbit-holes (not a bad thing for a hungry owl).

But here's where our night friends take a dark turn: owls are associated with stress, anger-issues, depression, mental disorders, substance abuse, social media addiction, obesity, inactivity, heart diseases, sleep apnea, diabetes ... and the list goes on.

Yikes.

Social jetlag

It's not all doom + gloom for the owl. The horrors could simply be a conflict between a late chronotype (your biological clock) and the demands of everybody else's working hours (the social clock). Remember only 15% of the world are late chronotypes.

Unawareness of one's late chronotype and therefore mismanaging this against the rest of the world's work schedule causes owls to sleep less in the week, and to repay sleep debt over the weekend.

This form of sleep fasting / binging is referred to as SOCIAL JETLAG, and guarantees poor sleep + compromised performance. Unsurprisingly, everything else slides rapidly downhill.

Advice

First: figure out your chronotype. There are 2 authoritative questionnaires (the MEQ + the MCTQ), and a host of other online varieties.

Next, map this against your social clock. Are you scheduling performance-centric tasks to your most alert hours, and your socials to your most active slots?

What about the people you work with? Do you have night owls, and do you schedule brainstorming or creativity-centric meetings to coincide with their peak times? A regular check on what their prime work times can go along way to boosting performance, and keeping everyone healthy.

As remote / hybrid working becomes the norm, knowing how to work with - and not against - people-based solutions is key. Schedule a coaching session to find out more, or book in a relaxology session to maximise the bang for your sleep buck.

References:

Note 1: 17 May 2018, "10 highly successful people who wake up before 6am", Careers column, CNBC by Abigail Johnson Hess.

Note 2: https://mymorningroutine.com/early-risers/#continue

Pacheco, D. & Rehman, A., "How sleep works - Chronotypes", from Sleepfoundation.org, published 29 April 2022.

Walker, M., "The science of better sleep", Masterclass (2022).