It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.” “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” writes Dr. The point is, none of these things help, and the thing that helps least of all is telling me that I should be doing something I am physically incapable of doing. Like the other day I woke up and I’d written a note in my phone that just said “subway philosophy” and “get Stella to send me to Japan,” which is probably not a reasonable story idea (though I feel like the time difference could work in my favor). I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve popped a zopiclone and then lain awake for three hours while coming up with great article ideas, only to wake up the next morning with an illegible list of ideas scrawled on notepaper. My body is trained to resist these things. I’ve tried medications, booze, herbs, elixirs. I’ve tried turning my phone off an hour before bed. Please don’t send me advice, because I don’t want it. Some people just have chronotypes that keep them up way later, like cats, or this woman who is my personal hero. Matthew Walker explains that the population is split between approximately 40 percent morning people, 30 percent night owls, with everyone else falling somewhere in the middle. While most people fall on “a sleep at 11, rise at 7” schedule, there are a lot of outliers. According to * clears throat* science, everyone has an internal clock, and everyone’s is different. And I need nine hours of sleep, so … I’m gonna be grouchy when I wake up, no matter what. and there’s nothing I can do to stop that. If I try to go to sleep earlier, I just end up lying in bed longer. I go to bed at midnight, at which point I lie awake for two hours thinking about everything I’ve ever done and ever will do in my entire life, before finally falling into a turbulent sleep around 2 a.m. What’s that, you meditate for 20 minutes every morning when you get up? Congrats, and go fuck yourself.įor me, the time I wake up and the time I fall asleep has never been a choice. But I have never done any of these things, because it is physically impossible for me to wake up at before 9 a.m., no matter how many of Arianna Huffington’s sleep hygiene tips I follow or how many passive-aggressive posts I read detailing the morning rituals of CEOs. I would love to pop awake at the crack of dawn, catch up on my long queue of educational podcasts, perform 20 minutes of calisthenics followed by an eight-step Korean skin-care ritual, respond to all my emails, have a long phone conversation with my friend who lives in Russia, walk my dog (that I would hypothetically own because I would now have time to take it for walks), all before I got my first “Good morning!” Slack. * Takes long puff of joint.*Īnd yet I would throw away my night-owl street cred in a heartbeat if I could wake up at 5:30 in the morning. Getting up early makes you better at life, but staying up late has always been, and always will be, more badass. Nighttime is the weird time - a time for dark thought spirals and convoluted internet holes and hangouts in smoke-filled bars that go on way longer than they should. Early rising is a time for productivity - it conjures the chirping of birds and the smell of freshly baked banana bread and the satisfying whoosh of a sent email. Sure, all the fun stuff happens at night - I’d much rather watch Colbert than Good Morning America, and I’d take another glass of wine over squeezing in a morning workout class any day. Look, it’s not that I want to be a night owl. On behalf of the Cut’s motley collection of night owls, late-risers, and people who generally feel like they’ve been hit by a cement truck if someone tries to shake them awake before 9 a.m., I’m afraid I must dissent. You want me to go to bed before dinnertime and then wake up in the middle of the night? You guys are capable of doing that? I feel like I’ve just learned that everyone around me has been gifted some set of secret magical powers that enable them to cheat at life, like all my colleagues are X-Men whose superpowers are being able to fall asleep and wake up whenever they want to. Recently, much to my horror, my colleague Edith Zimmerman published an article called “ An Argument for Waking Up Super-Early,” in which she describes the benefits of getting up at “5 or even 4 a.m.” To further rub salt in the wound, my colleague Katie Heaney wrote a follow-up piece called “ The Best Time to Go to Bed Is 8:45.”
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