![]() ![]() In other words, you can’t take a day off-even on the weekends. “As soon as you remove those constraints, people will revert right back to their natural chronotype,” he says. “The transition takes time,” she adds.ĭunster points out that for many people, especially families, this strict protocol is unsustainable. And if an earlier bedtime makes you toss and turn, melatonin can help you adjust to the new schedule, Van Cauter says. Plus, whatever is capturing your attention on the screen is probably keeping you up, too. Most devices emit blue light, a wavelength which is particularly good at mimicking sunlight. ![]() The trickier, but no less crucial, step: turning down the lights in the evening and avoiding screens. “It’s a powerful way to ease the transition,” Van Cauter says. That might involve a short walk upon waking or simply sitting in a sunny room. She emphasizes the importance of early-morning light. Van Cauter suggests a similar protocol could work for people who want to become early birds-or, at the very least, less owlish. ![]() By the end of the study, published in 2019 in the journal Sleep Medicine, participants were sleeping two hours earlier than before the study started, on average, and they reported lower depression and stress. They didn’t drink coffee or nap after 3:00 p.m., and crucially didn’t change this routine at any point during the week. and turned down the lights, avoiding screens before a bedtime that was three hours earlier than normal. At night, they stopped eating after 7:00 p.m. (So, if they were getting eight hours of sleep, their bedtime was 3AM.) For three weeks, the night owls followed strict protocol: They woke up three hours earlier than normal and exposed themselves to sunlight as soon as possible after getting out of bed. For these participants, the middle of a night’s sleep took place at nearly 7:00AM, when they didn’t have work or school. Scientists in England conducted a trial on 22 “extreme” night owls in their late teens and early twenties. By changing your environment, it is possible to change your chronotype, says Eve Van Cauter, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago Medical School. Is there any hope for night owls to change their ways, especially as those early morning meetings and school bells begin to take over daily life? Maybe. “The more industrial the area, the more electricity, the wider the variety,” he says. Electricity has also increased the variability in our internal clocks, Dunster says. Their results, published in 2018 in the journal Scientific Reports, found that in villages where electricity had lit up homes for two years or less, the middle of a night’s rest was one hour earlier on average compared to villages with access to electricity for longer than 15 years. For example, a team of Brazilian and German scientists studied seven villages in Brazil, with varying access to electricity. We still observe this effect today, when we compare people living in rural and urban areas. That doesn’t mean that night owls didn’t exist prior to the 19th century rather there were likely fewer of them, and they were probably on the less extreme end of the spectrum. Now the electricity that lights up our homes at night and powers our bright screens confuses our master clock, which mistakes it for daylight. “Until 200 years ago, the Industrial Revolution, our biological clocks and environmental clocks were much more in sync,” Dunster says. It wasn’t always so hard to wake up early.
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