November 30, 2009

Validation At Last!

“Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why.” states the first line in of the article ““The Evolution of Night Owls in Psychology Today magazine, December 2009, by Matthew Hutson, staff news editor. Seems they have now found a correlation between staying up late and high IQs. The “very bright” stay up later and rise later than the “very dull” (their labels, not mine). The article sites Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who argues,
“And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late.”
Well, I have always thought that people who called 8:00 a.m. Monday morning staff meetings were dumb and now I have proof!  All snarking aside, I did my own personal study around this when I was in college. I have never being an early morning person. My father was a night owl too. So was my mother’s mother. It’s genetic. So having to make early morning classes was always a struggle. My worst was history of art and architecture, 8 a.m., and then they turned the lights off for the slides to boot. Lots of head bobbing in that class.
One year I did an experiment. My hypothesis was that it wasn’t about the amount of sleep, but rather the hours on the clock I slept. So set up a schedule and parameters – six hours of sleep a night. The first week 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.; the second midnight to 6 a.m..; the last week 1:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Needless to say I woke more refreshed, alert and was more productive during the day with the latter schedule. Another indicator, with the 5a.m. rising I usually woke up feeling slightly nauseous. The 7a.m. wake up, no problem.
I have since experimented further. Left to my own devices, no boundaries on bedtime and no alarm upon waking, I will naturally gravitate to the later hours. Also, if I truly allow myself to do this for an extended period of time, I will start to wake up with the seasonal sunrise. This means in the summer I will get up at the crack of dawn without an alarm clock, happy to greet the early summer days. Doesn’t that just seem smarter?!

 

Posted by Catherine Adams Lee at 10:45 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)