Why Being a Night Owl Can Suck
And, according to research, why it can also be great
It’s 11pm and I’m still on Photoshop (my third solid hour) editing photographs. As someone who suffers blackouts when I don’t get at least 7 hours a night, this is a terrible practise for me — especially as I have to be up at 5:40am to beat the rush-hour traffic for my 9am lecture. It wouldn’t be so bad if this was a one-off, but it happens to me all the time.
I spend my morning moping around and procrastinating — usually, if social media is not involved, this means drinking tea and watching (comedy detective drama series) Psych — but, come late evening, I have a boost of extra motivation and a desire to get on with something. Though this is brilliant for impending university assignments, that ‘something’ usually has much less academic value.
This will always be me, though. As a creative, I get a lot more satisfaction out of completing my own tasks than I do from completing something more (academically) important. No amount of self-help articles on changing my productive output will help (believe me, I’ve read many of these) because in fact, my tendency to waste my morning hours has a lot to do with chronotypes.
Chronotypes control people’s circadian rhythms, thus, they are responsible for what makes some people natural night owls and others, morning larks. The biology behind chronotypes is not completely understood, but scientists believe that night owls have typically higher IQs.
This is both good and bad news for me. My ego loves the statistic that night owls score higher on indicative reasoning tests because this type of reasoning is directly linked to creative thinking. I like to think this will lend me a magical ability to make something out of my little photography business, or eventually get somewhere as a writer, but we night owls have a vulnerability that might stand in the way of such pursuits.
Along with the study that claims we are smarter, there is also the revelation that brain differences are responsible for our chronotypes. Unfortunately for night owls, these differences mean we are more likely to be predisposed to sleep disturbances and ill mental health. This specifically includes a vulnerability to depression and an inclination to develop bad habits such as smoking and drinking.
For me, this explains a lot. I’ve often noticed the link between creatives and insomnia (not least with Jimi Hendrix, who used to keep his band mates awake with his ceaseless late-night guitar playing), and indeed, accepted that many other creatives suffered deeply with depression (Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen and Ernest Hemmingway, to name just three). But this link also hits closer to home.
All throughout my childhood I suffered with insomnia, often waking up my parents with my frustration of forever lying awake in the dark. I’m also no stranger to depression and the suicidal thoughts that come with it. Anxiety joined us as a third wheel for a few years of my life too, and although I am ‘recovered’, my GAD still likes to leave me little reminders in the form of panic attacks should I ever finish a 330ml bottle of 7Up. Of course, if I blame all my bad luck on being a night owl, I’m probably blowing things out of proportion, but feeling like I have another biological factor to explain my emotional rollercoaster of a life, also makes me more at peace to embrace it and create.
Although my creativity often requires me to isolate myself and to ruminate (sometimes painfully) over the mystery of human behaviour, my night owl life (complete with essential illnesses) is what gives me the opportunity to do this, and ultimately, to produce something meaningful out of it.
