What’s your Chronotype?
Curious about your chronotype?
Or what a chronotype even is?
Our bodies crave routine, and you may have heard about the importance of keeping a consistent bedtime and wake time to achieve quality sleep. But beyond consistency there’s something trickier and less easy to define that is deeply impacting the quality of your sleep: determining your chronotype, or how many hours of sleep YOU need for YOUR body and WHEN those hours should take place.
In its simplest term, a chronotype refers to the natural, biological inclination of your body to sleep at a certain time. Chronotypes also affect performance and activity and energy levels, and it dictates when people feel more alert and fatigued during the day.
While I’d love to say the 8-hour sleep myth has been put to bed, unfortunately that’s not the case. It’s true that the average person needs roughly between 7-9 hours of sleep each night to function at their best, but that number is more flexible than you think. This means that you might need 8.5 hours of sleep to function, but I only need 7. And it’s not just knowing how many hours of sleep you need but what time of night you need them.
Chronotypes are largely genetic but they are also influenced by age, gender and other factors such as light, diet, and exercise.
For example, teenagers tend to go to bed late and wake up late because during their teen years, their circadian rhythm changes and melatonin doesn’t get released until much later at night - so they are biologically predisposed to staying up late. As we enter adulthood and our golden years, melatonin production starts occurring earlier at night, which is why seniors go to bed early and wake up early, giving biology all the credit for early bird specials.
In any case, determining that sweet spot of sleep for you is immensely helpful to not only improving your nights, but your days as well – if you’re able to pay attention to your body’s natural rhythms of rest and activity, you’ll be able to maximize your energy levels during the day and enjoy better quality sleep.
Variations in chronotype
The term chronotype has been around since the early 1900s and in the sleep world, it’s usually defined by the terms ‘morningness’ or ‘eveningness.’
Early birds (morning types) tend to wake up early and feel more energized and productive towards the beginning of the day (usually before noon) and tend to be asleep earlier. Night owls (evening types) are the ones who need a lie in and feel most alert, productive and creative towards the later hours of the evening. Night owls get a bad rap of being “lazy” because of their preferred late start times but it’s all a misconception - the thing is, both early birds and night owls need the same amount of sleep, it’s just that night owls live in a society (at least in North America) that values productivity between the hours of 9-5, which works against a night owl’s natural circadian rhythm and chronotype.
But these two chronotypes are not all-encompassing, there is variance. Some people are extreme early birds and others are moderate evening types.
Finding out your chronotype:
There are a few things you can do to get you started. For a high level overview, you can take the Morningness-Eveningness questionnaire, which is used to assess whether someone is a night owl, a morning lark, or in between. But most of you may already have an idea of where you fit in on this scale.
If you’re not sure, you can also ask yourself the following questions:
If I was on holiday with no external work or other commitments to wake up for, when would I wake up and go to sleep?
What time of day am I most productive?
If I could decide when to do my exercise for the day, when would that be?
Sleep coaching your chronotype
Part of my job as a Sleep Coach is helping people figure out what their natural rhythms and schedules are to maximize rest and activity. Because our sleep patterns change over time, and then add in any poor sleep habits on top of that, a lot of us have misaligned chronotypes, meaning we’re trying to keep to a sleep schedule that goes against our biology.
I fell into this trap years ago. I thought of myself as needing 9-10 hours of sleep and loving a long sleep in. The thing is, I could never fall asleep in a timely manner, and I always woke up too early, which was incredibly frustrating because I put in all these hours in bed, but I wasn’t actually sleeping well. And to compound this issue, my time spent in bed was NOT spent sleeping but worrying about sleep and ruminating about other things going on in my life, which ended up making my sleep worse. Through my own experience with severe insomnia, part of my treatment plan was determining my natural sleep rhythms through several months of detailed experimentation with sleep and wake times. In the end, to my absolute surprise, I discovered that I was more of a morning person, needing only about 7 hours of sleep between 11 pm-6 am.
Putting your chronotype into action:
If you have an idea of what your chronotype is and/or what’s your ideal bed and wake time, to maximize your sleep quality and productivity and mood during the day, the best thing to do is:
Keep to a consistent sleep/wake schedule: go to bed at roughly the same time each day and wake up at roughly the same time each morning, every day of the week – even weekends! Our bodies like routine and the more routinized we are, the more routinized and efficient other processes in our bodies become, including metabolism, melatonin production and release, hormone regulation, hunger, alertness, and more.
Follow a consistent eating schedule: what and when we eat can affect our daytime alertness levels and our ability to sleep at night. Our digestive system has its own circadian rhythm, which can interfere with our sleep system when we’re eating the wrong things at the wrong time.
Watch your light exposure: getting natural, unfiltered (think no sunglasses) sunlight first thing in the morning sends a signal to your brain to wake up and begins a cascade of hormone adjustment (e.g. melatonin levels decrease, cortisol rises). Conversely, limiting bright light exposure in the evenings helps with the production of melatonin and the reduction of cortisol, both processes that NEED to happen for you to fall asleep and stay asleep.
If we keep a consistent light schedule, eating schedule and wake and sleep schedule, it helps strengthen and regulate our circadian rhythm, making our bodies more likely to achieve quality and quantity sleep. And if you’re one of the lucky ones to have a more flexible work schedule, you can take advantage of this by scheduling work tasks, physical activity and even household chores that maximize your alertness levels throughout the day.
Have more questions about your chronotype and sleep rhythms? I’m always available to talk sleep or to have a free 20-minute discovery call.
