Good News for Night People

An article I read today, "Why Mornings Don't Make You Moral," named a feeling that has always plagued me: my sense of inadequacy for being a night person. I have never truly accepted that doing household chores, writing blog posts and reading books until midnight is equally as honorable as rising before dawn to carry out the same activities.

Author Maria Konnikova points to research that disproves that somehow we are better at what we do in the mornings (unless, of course, we are truly morning people); it’s simply they are better matched to what is commonly accepted in society. 

Early birds aren’t ethically superior. And, to the extent that other research suggests that they are, it may just be that they are luckier: modern society, for the most part, is built around their preferences. We are expected to function well  early in the morning. We can’t just wake up when our bodies tell us to and work when we feel at our peak.

Ah, don’t I know it! Take this morning, for example. The alarm on my phone went off. I sleepily grabbed it off the nightstand, hit snooze and put it next to my pillow so that I could reach it more easily after five more minutes of sleep. My spouse is truly a partner in this love affair with the snooze button. Both of us like to stay up late but school starts at 7:40 so we drag ourselves out of bed, wake up the boys and get on with the day.

What I loved about this article is that it encourages those of us who are night people to accept our chronotypes; 40% of us do work better at night. The hard part, as the author points out, is that night people are swimming upstream. I complain about getting up at 6:30. I think of the poor children who have to be on the bus at 6:00, which means their parents are up at 5:30 or even earlier. If they are night people, I truly feel sorry for them (and the school day should be later and shorter but that’s a post for another day).

Truth is, I am not one of those parents walking my kids to school dressed all spiffy for work. I exchange pajama pants for jeans, put on a coat and call it good. I think of my friend back in Minnesota who had five children of her own and ran an in-home day care. At 6 AM she had the house cleaned and was up and at’em. I guess this article doesn’t erase my admiration for the morning folks, but it does help me not beat myself up for being a different chronotype. I like clean floors, too. At midnight.

Konnikova quotes both Aristotle and Ben Franklin, two men who lauded the morning for its apparent benefits. I side instead with the Garfield quote found on a free McDonalds drinking glass I used as a kid: “I don’t do mornings.”