Nocturnality — the behavioural tendency to be active in the nighttime and sleep during the day — is a condition displayed by many creatures. Moths, bats, hedgehogs, mice — to name but a few — are all active at night. Interestingly, we accept nocturnality as natural for any species except our own. In humans, the tendency to stay awake during the night is labelled as a ‘sleep disorder’: a condition in need of correction. Despite this negative image, 44 per cent of Brits describe themselves as night owls, with 12 per cent admitting to having daily trouble falling asleep.
All this points to one obvious notion, namely, that human nocturnality must be more common than convention suggests. And that’s exactly what we’re here to investigate.
Night Owls And Morning Larks
Humans are divisible by their chronotype – the body’s natural, biologically preferred sleeping, waking, and activity cycle within a 24h day. Morning larks sleep earlier, typically between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am, and are most productive soon after waking. Night owls prefer to burn the midnight oil and go to sleep in the early hours, rising later in the day.
A lark’s productivity generally wanes after 10.5 hours, something which owls can sustain for longer following later starts. But despite demonstrating higher intelligence levels, better memory retention, and faster processing speeds, owls perform worse academically than their ‘counterlarks,’ who also enjoy more career success.
Understanding the Science of Good Sleep
The importance of a decent night’s sleep cannot be overstated. It is as vital to our survival as breathing oxygen. During shuteye, the body carries out physical repair, resets the immune system, and consolidates learning. Adults need around two hours of REM (dream) sleep per night for brain function, memory consolidation and emotional health. Staying awake for as ‘little’ as 24 hours is generally considered unsafe, as sleep deprivation impairs concentration, making you effectively ‘over the limit.’ And 36 hours without sleep (which I’ve neared) can bring hallucinations, increased euphoria (sounds familiar) or aggression. After 72 hours, speech and walking become impaired. Poor sleepers Jacq and Christopher will share their experiences shortly. But first, let’s ask: How can we get a decent night’s sleep?
If you opt for sleep counselling, you will hear the ‘parable’ of Pavlov’s Dogs, who heard a bell immediately before feeding time. After repeating the action enough times, the ringing sound alone made them salivate. They had been conditioned to associate the tinkling bell with food. Similarly, we can make certain stimuli trigger the sleep response.
One strategy is to devise a nightly routine of activities that naturally help the body relax and switch off. Try observing them in the same order and at the same time every night to let the brain register this ‘ritual’ as a time to switch off. Anything from aromatherapy, listening to relaxing music, reading a book, meditating or taking a bath can potentially help to relax the body and prepare it for sleep.
Another useful tip is to use your bedroom space primarily for sleeping. If little things nag at you, then compose a to-do list before bedtime and place it somewhere in the house that’s not your bedroom. This will help you to ‘let the day go.’ Keep all devices and chargers in another room overnight. These small measures will help to free your mind from daily thoughts and create a peaceful sleeping sanctuary. And of course, do try to go to bed at the same time every night, including weekends. This is important. Committing to a specific sleep time, the feel of your pyjamas and soft bedsheets, a space free of phone calls and social media all help to signal to your brain that it’s time for rest.
Finally, keeping things dark and cool is equally important. Exposure to reduced light before bed helps the body produce melatonin, the hormone vital for sleep. About thirty minutes before bedtime, put all your devices in another room to avoid that disruptive screen light. Excessive heat is another factor in poor sleep. Cooler conditions are known to aid melatonin production. The best bedroom temperature is between 15.6°C-19.4°C (60-67 Fahrenheit). This might be tougher to achieve in the summertime, but keeping a fan on, substituting a sheet for a duvet, and keeping the window wide open to let airflow will all help considerably.
Insomnia: Anxious Thoughts and Unhelpful Behaviours
Just as sleep is behavioural, Dr Lindsay Browning describes insomnia as ‘a more behavioural than hormonal disorder.’ At the same time, she says it’s exacerbated by ‘unhelpful behaviours and anxious thoughts,’ not least about sleep itself.
Christopher, one of the two people I interviewed, recalls the ‘pure Hell of insomnia. Falling asleep at 11pm-midnight, but waking up at 1 am, completely unable to get back to sleep.’ A prescription of Zopiclone to treat severe cases of insomnia meant he ‘woke up at 3 am instead of 1 am. Hardly much of an improvement.’
Nighttime awakenings are far from rare, but sensitivity to the problem generates an anxiety that can be more disruptive in the long term than bouts of intermittent sleep. A sleeper with anxiety is more prone to insomnia, and when sleep problems are the main source of this anxiety it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Jacq, the second of my interviewees, has had trouble sleeping at night ‘for as long as [she] can remember.’ After being awake for forty hours straight, she was hospitalised and given a ‘horse tranquiliser’ with no effect. ‘How could other people sleep through the lights or noise of the ward?’ she asks partly rhetorically. Simple. They weren’t stimulated by the whirring lights. Nor conscious of the need for slumber. Sleep needs to be an automatic, almost knee-jerk reaction to certain stimuli. But for those with sleeping problems, the more you try to drift off, the harder it becomes to get a visit from the elusive Sandman. Sadly, the people most in need of slumber are the least able to get it. But there is another paradox at play.
You’ve probably heard the usual sleep advice like ‘avoid alcohol,’ ‘no caffeine after 4 pm,’ ‘resist napping or keep them to 20 minutes,’ and ‘don’t exercise in the evening, you will stimulate your brain when it needs to wind down.’ However, these tips can be especially unhelpful for poor sleepers. An insomniac will often drink more coffee throughout the day to stay awake, grab overdue sleep when it finally arrives, and go for a late run following a later start (in an attempt to tire themselves out). Then, when nighttime arrives, the effects of these activities are felt in full.
One thing that we haven’t considered here, however, is the possibility that general sleep advice may be incompatible with the reality of our natural sleep habits. Dim lighting, low caffeine, a balanced daily routine and that fixed eight-hour window for sleeping may sound very reasonable, and some of us will even succeed in accomplishing most of this while being rewarded with good sleep. But for the rest of us, for the 44 per cent who struggle with sleep, the evidence points to a need for a new, broader perspective. One that respects people’s different chronotypes.
Nothing is Made for Poor Sleepers, Not Even Sleep Therapy
Cooking home-grown beans? Soak them overnight. Silver jewellery lost its shine? Immerse in gin overnight. Making a delicious chocolate ‘toothpaste tart’? Chill it overnight.
The world is designed for conventional hours. Even basic household tips assume nobody will be up while they work their magic.
Morning larks and diurnals (or ‘dayturnals’) complain that shops and services are only open during their work hours. So it’s easy to imagine the frustration faced by later risers whose time window is cut even shorter or often nonexistent.
Even sleep support services seem to overlook the challenges faced by their target usership.
I sleep better on melatonin, but it cannot continue indefinitely. It’s designed to help sleepers re-establish a circadian rhythm. The alternative is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which is not available for free in my district and may well prove ineffective. Even Dr Browning, who treats insomnia with CBT-I, admits that ‘trying harder to make sleep happen is often far more destructive to sleep.’ In that case, paying for a treatment that even sleep professionals admit is imperfect seems foolish and a waste of time.
Without melatonin, I will likely be back to square one: out like a light, wide awake as little as ten minutes later. All of the advice available is how to get to sleep. But what about staying asleep? Apart from one piece of advice which I’m frankly sick of hearing (‘Don’t fall asleep too fast’), remaining asleep seems impossible to control. This wakefulness could be something we’ve inherited from our ancestors. Natural awakenings throughout the night are believed to have ‘enabled people to periodically check the environment for safety.’ According to ‘Sleep Geek’ James Wilson, it’s a trait that appears woven into ‘our genetics [that] predispose us to sleeping well or poorly, and determine our chronotype.’
Modern electricity has enabled us to experience longer periods of light, albeit artificial, than was previously the case. If our ancestors habitually stayed awake in darkness to check for beasts, the nocturn’s brain may now be overwhelmed by the longer light hours, leaving it too stimulated to get forty winks.
Food is another tricky factor in a nocturn’s life. Many nocturns report day-long hunger after eating too early. The culprit is an insulin spike following breakfast, or rather, sensitivity to it. Night owls may be more vulnerable to the effects of this spike if their ancestors stayed awake on night watch and skipped breakfast.
This brings us to some key differences between being a night owl and having a sleep disorder — something that affects almost 1 in 5 Brits and 64.9 per cent of young people. Sleep tendencies have to meet certain criteria — frequency, duration, and impact on daytime functioning — to qualify as a sleep disorder. But given what we know about our ancestral past, it’s plausible to argue that nighttime wakefulness or ‘owling’ is not a lifestyle choice or a sleep disorder, but a trait carried from our genetic blueprint. The problem is that those with nocturn genes find themselves negotiating a world ‘structured in direct conflict with their biology,’ to quote our Sleep Geek.
Economic Challenges for Nocturns
Conventional hours are so embedded in our society that being nocturnal carries a certain stigma. To be an ‘early riser’ suggests a tendency towards hard work and commands respectability, but to rise late implies idleness and demotivation.
Those of us predisposed to rise later are expected to march from the mattress during the muscle paralysis stage of REM sleep, when the body is literally immobile. Unsurprisingly, being woken from her first moment of REM sleep caused Jacq ‘piercing physical pain through [the] whole body. It can only be described as a torture that haunts me today.’ The popular view that night owls should ‘just get up in the morning’ conveniently ignores the biological fact that they cannot. We would never expect a diabetic to forgo insulin. Yet sleep deprivation is routinely normalised and trivialised. Historically, however, certain countries and regimes have been known to use it as a literal form of torture, precisely because it’s so effective. Despite this, we chastise owls for underperforming in school or work, institutions that are tailor-made for larks. As for the talents of owls, who are said to be naturally more creative, these often go unnoticed simply because nobody is awake to witness them.
Nocturns commonly report a surge in energy and creative inspiration after 10 pm. It’s a boost like no other. The mind isn’t just switched on; it’s fully alive with action and movement. This creative surge makes you impatient to complete ideas that seem to come at you from all angles.
For nocturns like Jacq, these energy spurts help her personality to ‘finally come out.’ She tells me that as a child, her ‘mind would race, creativity surging through my veins, and I would write poetry and novels, compose songs in my head, make up dance routines to the latest pop song, smash video games.’ As an adult, she’s channelled this drive by staying late at work to ‘churn through asset management applications like there’s no tomorrow, winning awards for productivity.’
Unfortunately, this option is not universal or commonplace. The creativity associated with nocturnality needs unconventional hours to manifest properly. The result is that much talent goes unnoticed and unwaged, unless owls find a way to turn freelance. However, in the eyes of society, this amounts to being precariously employed and a potential liability. That’s far from ideal when you need to pay higher energy bills after staying up late when it’s cold and dark. And if you happen to be a sleepwalker like me, who likes to turn on the heating and lights, well, you can guess the rest … .
For those in lower income brackets, there is less opportunity to freelance and even more likelihood of experiencing disrupted sleep. The increased risk of poor sleep has so far been linked to shift work, longer work hours, higher stress levels, and poorer healthcare access. Even diet and uncomfortable housing are seen as factors that can disrupt sleep. Nearly everything has been considered as a potential trigger, apart from the possibility that some people simply struggle with sleep because they are naturally nocturnal.
Little wonder then that owls are more prone to depression. Feeling misunderstood, underperforming at work, being overlooked and labelled ‘lazy’ can understandably bring the best of us down and make you feel inadequate. Trying to solve this with medication is rarely a permanent solution and can make things worse. Crucially, denying the body its natural rest time can leave nocturns exhausted and permanently fatigued. When you are tired and struggling to keep up, creativity is the last thing on your mind. Jacq describes it as ‘losing [a] part of yourself, not feeling happy or authentic. Just masking to meet society’s expectations.’ This is a sad reality that many of us who are nocturnal privately grapple with.
Redesigning the System
Owls face considerable discrimination for being out of sync with society’s work-life cycle. The Sleep Geek stresses that this is ‘not a sleep problem, but a systems problem.’ Rather than forcing nocturns to adapt to society, it ought to be the other way around. A little accommodation goes a long way.
Since COVID, we have seen hybrid work flourish, and this had nothing to do with helping nocturnals fit in. It was done for the sake of necessity, and it worked rather well. So, why deny these essential adjustments now to those who desperately and genuinely need them? The only way to guarantee these adjustments are made and expanded is to enshrine them into law.
The reasonable adjustments policy focuses on changing the way work is conducted or adapting the workplace to make it easier for employees. Presently, it only applies to workers with ‘disabilities, or physical or mental health conditions.’ Since the latter is so closely linked to disrupted sleep and nocturnality, extending reasonable adjustments to cover poor sleepers and nocturns is far from radical; it’s practical. This could mean later starting times, nap pods, working from home, or recruiting job-shares (one day and one night worker sharing a post). Each employee will know how their unique circumstances would be better served, so adaptation and adjustment should happen on a case-by-case basis.
Once we know the range of common adaptations desired by nocturns, we will better understand what products and services have a market. This way, businesses and organisations can introduce them more effectively.
Given that an owl’s energy bill is often higher during the winter months, a special night owl energy tariff should be made available. Offering a cheaper rate based on lifestyle might sound outlandish, but something similar already exists. A Network Rail card reduces travel costs in Southeast England. It entitles you to a lower rate if, through no choice of your own, you need to travel where it is more expensive. The card has been a godsend for commuters living in London’s dormitory towns. But if customers can receive a lower rate for an essential service based on where they happen to work and live, something similar should be offered for, well, when they happen to work.
If you think about it, adapting the world for night owls only entails extending measures already in place. It might sound like a tall order, but it’s nothing to lose sleep over.
A special thank you to the three experts who helped with the article:
Sleep expert James ‘The Sleep Geek’ Wilson — thesleepgeek.co.uk
Dr Lindsay Browning, a sleep expert at TroubleSleeping.co.uk. She can be found on social media @DrBrowningSleep.
Christine Lawler, LMFT, a licensed therapist with over 15 years of experience. Founder of ‘The Peaceful Sleeper.’ Author of ‘The Peaceful Sleeper: An Intuitive Approach to Baby Sleep.’
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