Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Can a Night Owl Become a Morning Person?

When I told my friends I had found a way to transform myself into a morning person, they responded in one of two ways. The night people leaned in as if I were about to reveal the location of a stash of pirate gold. The morning people simply regarded me with pity and wonder. "I just don't understand why it's so hard," said one friend, a Danish medical student. "I can get up anytime I want."

This sort of smugness is prevalent among morning people, who count among their ranks Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, nearly every American president, and even Jesus. (See Mark 1:35: "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.") Night people are stuck with psychopaths like Adolf Hitler and Juan Arreola, the guy in Pennsylvania who nearly killed his girlfriend's 2-year-old last year, explaining to a judge, "I'm not a morning person."

I'd always been a night owl, but for years I'd longed to defect to the other side. In my fantasies, I was a Fortune 500-type who threw off the covers at 5 and engineered a hostile takeover by 7. Instead, I generally stayed up until 1:30 in the morning, reading magazines or clicking aimlessly through Wikipedia, waking up grumpy and remorseful at 9:30, if not later. Over the years I'd tried all the usual tactics—multiple alarms, earlier bedtimes, lab-rat levels of caffeine—and nothing had worked.
When I left my office job and started freelancing, things got worse. One day, after crawling out of bed at 10:30, I decided enough was enough. I needed help. So, I called up a battery of doctors and sleep researchers and put the question to them: Can a night person rewire herself to fall asleep at a reasonable hour and jump out of bed in the morning like a farmer with chickens to feed?

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Posted by Ajay :: 5:14 PM :: 0 comments

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