You can find out chronotype by taking the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (find an online version of it here). These people prefer to go to sleep around 8 pm. About 1 percent of the population has what’s known as advanced sleep phase syndrome. Some adults are on the other end of the spectrum. The condition is much more common among teens, whose clocks gradually shift earlier as they age. People with this condition often have trouble falling asleep before 3 am or even later. Only around 0.2 percent of adults - one in 500 - have a condition known as delayed sleep phase, which is the chronic inability to go to bed early. That just means women are slightly more likely to have an “average” chronotype than men, as you can see in tallest line in the middle of the chart above.īut there are men and women at the extremes on either end. Men tend to vary more on chronotype than women. A mid-sleep of 0 is midnight, a mid-sleep of 4:00 is 4 am, and so on. The term “mid sleep” on the x-axis simply means the time people are halfway through their sleep for the night. Average sleep is between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am, give or take an hour.īelow, see the results of the chronotypes of 53,689 Americans charted in a 2017 study in PLOS One. Most people - around 50 percent - fall right in the middle of the chronotype bell curve. Just like it’s pretty rare for a person to be 7 feet tall, it’s pretty rare for some people to not be able to go to bed before 3 am. Chronotypes are our preferred times to be asleep And it’s really okay to be this way - we should accommodate and respect it. Or, at the very least, it helps us recognize that some people just like to sleep later than others. Understanding the science of chronobiology may help us live healthier lives. Having a very late chronotype is like living in a constant state of jet lag, which takes a toll on the body. It’s hard to know how all these risks interplay with one another, and there’s no clear answer as to why there may be health risks to being a late sleeper.īut here’s a compelling hypothesis: When our biological clock is out of sync with society’s, our whole biology gets thrown off, and many aspects of our lives grow more stressful. As the authors note, “any increase” in risk of death “warrants attention.” The analysis also revealed greater rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease, gastrointestinal problems, and psychological distress among evening-type people. These results don’t mean an early death is imminent for late risers.īut it’s still concerning. Of the 430,000-plus subjects in this study, just a fraction - 10,500, or about 2 percent - died within the study period. An individual’s actual risk of dying in any given year is small. It’s always important to note with studies like these that the 10 percent indicates a relative increase in the risk of death. And this was true for people of all ages in the study, and for both men and women. It found a correlation: Those who reported having a later chronotype (people who are night owls) had a 10 percent increased likelihood of dying compared to people who had an earlier chronotype. This past week, researchers at Northwestern and the University of Surrey published a huge study in the journal Chronobiology Internationalof more than 433,000 adults in the UK, who had been tracked for an average of 6.5 years. It may even put you at higher risk of early death. Scientists have been circling around one answer that’s very concerning: that there are real, and negative, health consequences of being a later chronotype (going to sleep well after midnight and rising later). That is: What happens if you’re a late riser living in an early riser’s world? And, increasingly, researchers have been investigating what happens to people whose body clocks are out of sync with the rest of society. Our preferences for when to sleep are called chronotypes. There are “morning people,” “evening people,” and those in between. We all have a preferred time for sleeping - a body clock.
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