Chronotypes: Are Morning Larks And Night Owls A Real Thing?

Are you a morning lark or a night owl?

Morning larks are those of us who find it easier to wake up in the morning and be super productive.

Night owls find it more difficult to wake up early, and if they do they tend to lack energy, but when the afternoon and evening rolls around they are very energetic and productive.

Personally I am a morning person.

I have no problem getting up early and getting sh*t done! In fact I prefer it.

Ask me to exercise or do hard cognitive work in the evening and I dread it, I am just too tired. I can do it if I have to, but I don’t want to do it.

However, I was not always like this…

I think back to being a teenager and I would regularly sleep till 11 AM, getting up early was terrible. In college I was regularly up well past midnight.

Today I am lucky if I can sleep till 7 AM without waking up naturally, and if you ask me to stay up past midnight it takes me a week to recover.

What changed?

Life changed. In college I was only responsible for myself and the only responsibilities I had involved attending class. I also likely had a more robust body that could bounce back from the alcohol and pizza fueled late nights.

Now I have a job that starts at 8 AM and kids who are up at 6 AM, staying out past midnight eating crappy food and drinking is not going to put me in the best of spots to perform the next day.

This experience has always made me wonder…when someone says they are a morning lark or a night owl is that real or is it the circumstances and constraints of life which dictates the time of day we are most productive and energetic? And if being a morning lark or night owl is a real thing, what impact might it have on our health when we don’t adhere to our natural schedule?

Morning Larks and Night Owls: Fact or Fiction

Before diving into whether morning larks or night owls are real, I think it might be useful to elaborate on exactly what these terms are referring to.

The terms morning lark and night owl are actually referring to something called a chronotype. A chronotype is a person’s natural inclination with regard to the times of day when they prefer to sleep or when they are most alert or energetic.

If you Google chronotype, you likely won’t see anything about night owls or morning larks instead you will see 4 chronotypes: lion, bear, dolphin, and wolf

https://www.aricove.com/a/blog/understanding-your-chronotype-for-better-performance

In the above image a morning lark would be a lion and a night owl would be a wolf. But we also know that there are people who fall outside those guidelines. Lots of people fall more into the bear category, they follow the sun for their sleep and wake cycles and are therefore most productive mid-day.

Then there are the dolphins that have no real set schedule and can do anything.

While the lion, bear, wolf and dolphin chronotypes are cute and make things easier to remember, when science studies chronotypes they don’t use these distinctions.

Instead scientists use questionnaires to try and classify people into various chronotypes.

What Is Your Chronotype?

There are two popular questionnaires that scientists use, one called the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire or MEQ and the other called the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire or MCTQ. The MEQ questionnaire determines chronotype based on your preferences while the MCTQ questionnaire determines chronotypes by calculating a sleep midpoint time.

If you dive deep into these questionnaires the way your chronotype is determined is very different. The MEQ is much more about your subjective thoughts and about how you would behave under certain circumstances while the MCTQ is very objective and is a mathematical equation.

You can take the MEQ questionnaire yourself online here. The MEQ will classify you as definite evening, moderate evening, intermediate, moderate morning, definite morning.

Because the MCTQ questionnaire is basically a mathematical equation I was actually able to use ChatGPT to calculate my score. You can see that conversation with ChatGPT to calculate my own chronotype using the MCTQ here.

Once you know your mid sleep point by using the MCTQ, you can figure out if you are an early type, intermediate types, or late type. Here are the cutoffs for each type:

Early Type: Mid-sleep before 3:00 AM.

Intermediate Type: Mid-sleep between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM.

Late Type: Mid-sleep after 5:00 AM.

While I think it is nice that we have scientifically proven ways to find out what your chronotype is, I think most people have a general idea of where they fall so I don’t think you need to take a questionnaire to figure that out.

With a better understanding of what a chronotype is I also think it is important to understand how your chronotype relates to circadian rhythms.

Circadian rhythms refer to the natural cycles our body goes through over the course of the day.

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https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/8/5/413

Everyone, regardless of what our chronotype, has a circadian rhythm that should be occurring across 24 hours. Due to our chronotypes the time of day at which these processes within our circadian rhythms occur will differ from one chronotype to the other.

For example, someone who has an early chronotype will see their lowest body temperature occur early in the night than someone who has a late chronotype. Both people still reach a low body temperature, but the time on the clock at which that happens will be different.

This is where we could potentially run into some health issues. If our chronotypes force our circadian rhythms into a sequence that doesn’t match our lifestyle, what happens is we start falling into patterns and doing things at a time of day where the right hormonal processes are not working optimally. In next week’s blog post we will look at the health impacts when our chronotypes, circadian rhythms and lifestyle don’t align. If you would like to be the first to know when that blog post is released be sure to sign up for my newsletter using the form below and I will email you as soon as it is available.