Chronobiology: getting up for school and work in the morning is a torture for some

Part of our society is biologically incompatible with the generally accepted standard of starting work at 9 and school at 8 (or earlier, I do not greet my high school) in the morning. It should be genetics.

This is another study which proves that some people are not adapted to getting up early . Chronobiology, i.e. the study of natural biological cycles, such as the seasons or the daily cycle, deals with this type of research. For years it has been regulated by generally accepted cultural patterns. In the morning we have to go to work and now.

Chronotype , or from what time are you conscious?

One of the first people in science to find that this pattern may conflict with the chronotype in some people was Till Roenneberg from the LMU in Munich.

In his opinion, most people can be divided (in a simplified way) into three categories: those who like to wake up very early (5-6 in the morning), people compatible more or less with current standards (work from 9 is not torture for them, but do not go to bed at 20) and those who like to get up very late and sit at night.

Incompatibility of your day with the chronotype, as demonstrated by research conducted by scientists from the American Institute of Health (National Institute of Health), may result in excessive fatigue, a feeling of drowsiness and a tendency to binge, to compensate for too early wake up.

Waking up too early, you stress unnecessarily.

A team of English scientists from the University of Birmingham, led by Elise Facer-Childs, added another brick for research on the chronotype. Research published by the Sleep Research Society shows that our chronotype has an effect on daily fluctuations in melatonin and cortisol production.

The level of these two hormones directly affects our well-being and, consequently, our productivity. Studies conducted by Facer-Childs show that people who wake up too early relative to their chronotype are exposed to higher levels of stress, excessive fatigue and a significant reduction in overall productivity.

Studies conducted on a group of 38 volunteers suggest that people with a tendency to sit at night should start their day 3 to 4 hours later than the so-called early birds. So this means that the generally accepted work pattern from 9 to 17 reduces the productivity of a significant part of society and some of us should appear in the workplace around ... 12:00 and leave after 20.

Night owls have similar problems at school

Another study on chronotypes focused on students from Buenos Aires. In this city, schools operate in three shifts - morning, afternoon and evening, which gave the team of Maria J. Leone the opportunity to test the mental performance of students from each of these groups. We are talking here about examining 750 randomly selected people, which should cause that different chronotypes should be distributed fairly evenly between the three groups.

Nothing could be more wrong. The worst results - literally, because schools in Buenos Aires, instead of grades, use a point scale, where 100 is the highest score and 26 is required to pass a given test or subject - the morning group reached.

According to the researchers, this shows that in the early hours of the day someone with a night-time chronotype has problems with general mental performance and experiences a kind of mini-jetlag. The difference in the average results obtained by students from the morning group compared to the rest of the respondents was the largest and amounted to 0.32. If I were in high school, I would start to protest that as a night owl, I am being repressed by the morning teaching system.

Well, unless you can switch to getting up early

So can we change our chronotype? Yes, we can influence him. To a certain extent. At least that's what Roenneberg and Leone say. According to the researchers, frequent being outside in sunlight causes a gradual shift towards the earlier chronotype.

In addition, the younger someone is, the easier it is to adapt to their morning functioning. However, this is not the rule - there are people in the world who will always be a little more unconscious than the rest of society in the morning.

Chronobiology: getting up for school and work in the morning is a torture for some