Society's bigotry against night owls

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, but here's another excellent article on what it's like to live with Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder and, in the process, endure society's bias against night owls:

Both environmental and genetic factors have been linked to these offset circadian rhythms, so people with delayed sleep can’t fully control when their bodies get tired, or when they’re ready to get up.  

This doesn’t stop articles, schedules, or well-intentioned friends from insisting we’d be better off if we just made ourselves go to bed “at a normal time.” 

Night owls remain a misunderstood, maligned minority. We defy the conventional wisdom, missing out on the proverbial worm and whatever instincts make early risers “healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Researchers estimate that about one in 10 adolescents go through a period of delayed sleep, but just a fraction of 1 percent still have the condition into adulthood. 

Because so many teens and college kids naturally stay up late and sleep in longer, people associate that pattern with immaturity and childishness. Staying up until the wee hours is something you’re expected to grow out of; adulting means you embrace your 6 am wakeup with joy. (For bonus grown-up points, you complain that you can’t make it to midnight, even on New Year’s Eve.) 

Those of us still hours from our alarms when others have completed their morning routines know we’re getting the figurative side-eye for staying in bed. I sense a bit of rise-and-shine smugness from the friend who posts a list of the things she got done before 9 am or even the countless articles on how to become a morning person. We’re all expected to conform to the early bird schedule; Real Simple and Women’s Health aren’t doling out tips on how to stay up later.

Society's bias towards early risers - and the pressure it puts on night owls to conform to a "normal" schedule even though they might not be biologically predispositioned to do so - is, quite frankly, a form of bigotry. I'd like to believe that we night owls are finally beginning to find our voices - after all, science seems to have our backs - but the false perception that late risers are lazier or less effective than early birds will require continual challenge.

For all the knocks against night owls, we remain regarded as more creative, impulsive, and strategic thinkers. There’s something to the caricature of the artist, inventor, or writer staying up chasing their ideas. Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated documentary director, said working late is part of his process: “I’m a night owl, and luckily my profession supports that. The best ideas come to me in the dead of night. My friends know I’m up, so they can call at three in the morning. Just don’t call me at, like, 8.” 

I get it. I feel most clear-headed, productive, and energized in the evenings, free to work as long as I’d like. If you’ve ever gone to work in an empty office — on a weekend or holiday or a day when everybody else was on vacation — that’s what working after midnight feels like. There are no meetings, no places to be, no disruptions. It’s eerily quiet, just you and your thoughts. 

The more we give night people the freedom to lean into their after-dark rhythms, I believe the more we’ll continue to see the benefits of flexible schedules, as employee satisfaction and efficiency thrive.

I don't know if I have DSPD, but I have always been a night owl. Right now it's well after 11 pm, and after I finish this blog entry I have a few other tasks to do before I finally crawl into bed. This is how it is for me virtually every night: I feel especially energetic and productive during these late hours. I'm not the least bit sleepy, and if I tried to go to bed right now I'd simply toss and turn and stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours. This is who I am, this is how I live, and at 43 years of age I'm not going to change.

Early birds are free to rise at 5:30 am; they are even allowed to feel superior for doing so. But they're not allowed to think of us night owls as a lazy degenerates simply because we don't conform to their schedules.