If you’re a night owl it’s often a struggle to get early risers to understand what you’re going through; the AM is not our friend, our brains work in overdrive, and we tend to be big thinkers. And we’re not alone – according to studies done in England, 41% of people consider themselves night owls, feeling their best work when they’re burning the midnight oil.
Night owls know that there’s more to us that just not being ready to go sleep:
We’re pretty goddamn intelligent
It may not come as a surprise to other night owls, but the later you go to bed the more intelligent you might be. A recent study has compared the sleeping patterns of hundreds of teenage Americans to their IQs, and it turns out those who go to bed later are higher up on the intelligence spectrum. Conversely, the kids that write with crayons and enjoy the taste of glue tended to call it a night far earlier. Take from that what you will.
We’re not being lazy when we wake up late
We wake up late because we go to bed late. It’s that simple. If you catch us snoozing until midday we’re not trying to grab more sleep than everyone else, it’s ‘cos we went to sleep at 4:00am and we need our eight hours. So we’re not being lazy when we sleep in most of the morning, we’re just completing our sleep cycle, which means…
Mornings are not our thing
If you try and wake us up at a conventional time, things are not going to go well for you. Making us wake up at 7:30am is like trying to get you to wake up at 3:30am; chances are you won’t be firing on all cylinders, you’ll be more than a little grouchy, and you aren’t going to appreciate the interruption from your comfortable little dream world. So have a little sympathy when you schedule a meeting for first thing Monday morning.
We’re creative geniuses
Throughout history some of the greatest and most influential creative types have been late sleepers. Kid-genius, piano-plinker Wolfgang Mozart hit the hay around the 1:00am mark, mustachioed cubism trailblazer Pablo Picaso tucked himself in around 2:00am and the father of mind-fuckery, Franz Kafka didn’t consider going to bed until 5:00am. If you burn the midnight oil, chances are you have a world of creativity going on in your brain box, sometimes a few late nights is what is needed to bring the magic out.
The rest of the world is catching up with us
Time was we all went to bed when the sun went down, because we didn’t have fucking electricity. But thanks to this miracle of innovation, we can stay up later without having to rely on a burning ball of nuclear fusion to dictate our sleep pattern, and as a result society as a whole is going to bed later. Studies indicate that our sleeping patterns are getting later and later, so you might not be on the same page with us now, but you soon will be.
It’s hardwired into our system
We can wake up early if we really have to, but to do it on the reg isn’t in our genetic make up. Studies have shown that those who go to bed late tend to be a bit slower during the morning hours, but throughout the day we pick up speed and hit our optimal level around 9:00pm. Word of warning morning people, screw with the sleep cycle and you’re not going to have us at our best and brightest.