Late sleepers get a bad rap.
Maybe your friend who wakes up at 5 a.m. every
day is a little quirky, but I bet they’re productive.
Your friend who wakes up at 11 every day, what do you think about them?
But it turns out, sleeping late isn’t just
a preference or a bad habit. Research is showing that our bedtime could be coded into our DNA.
Each of us has an internal clock, but my clock isn’t necessarily in sync with yours.
That’s because we all have our own chronotypes, or preferred sleeping patterns.
Scientists study chronotypes by tracking when people go to sleep on days they don’t have to
go to work or school.
This chart shows the the mid-point of people’s sleep on those free days. If you go to bed around
11 pm and get up between around 7 am, you have an average chronotype.
A very small number of people on either end of the chart have very early or very late chronotypes.
But even those of us who are just slightly behind the average chronotype can feel jet-lagged
every day. If you have an average chronotype,
you’re generally getting the same amount of sleep on
both free days and work days.
Your sleep schedule fits with society’s schedule.
But the later your chronotype, the bigger the difference between the amount of sleep
you get on free days versus work days.
So going back to a work day after a free day is like flying over several time zones.
And to understand why, you need to look at the master clock in our body. It's a bundle of neurons
called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus, or SCN. If you have a normal chronotype
you SCN tells your pineal gland to start producing melatonin around 9 pm, that makes you sleepy.
Around 10:30, your colon starts suppressing bowel movements. Your body temperature drops to its lowest point
around 4:30 am, and your blood pressure reaches its highest point around 6:45 am, so you’re
at your most alert around 10 am But for people with late chronotypes, all
this stuff happens later in the day. And there’s not much they can do about it.
That’s because inside the neurons that make up the SCN, scientists have discovered something
called clock genes. These genes turn on and off throughout the
day to keep your body on a 24-hour cycle. This time-lapse of the SCN shows these clock
genes releasing proteins every 24 hours for a week like...clockwork
Researchers who study families of extreme early-risers show that many of them share
the same mutation on one of these clock genes. Studies have found similar mutations in hamsters
hamsters with early chronotypes. But when scientists took out these hamsters’ SCN, their body clock,
and replaced them with the SCNs of normal hamsters, they still woke up and went to sleep
super early. That’s because the SCN isn’t our only
biological clock. you also have all these little clocks in every
single cell of your body
In the early-rising hamsters, these clocks in the body preserved the early chronotype,
even after the brain’s SCN was taken out. And for humans, this helps explain why it’s
nearly impossible for late sleepers to adjust to society’s schedule...the cells in their
bodies literally won’t let them. And that’s a problem.
In one study, researchers took healthy people
and messed with their sleep schedules. After three weeks, they had early signs of diabetes.
People with late chronotypes are also more likely to be smokers and to develop depression.
and maybe that should change the way we think about sleep, it's not this nuisance, it's this fundamental part of life.
Maybe some late sleepers are lazy, sure. But the rest have been sorely misunderstood.