3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late
February 8th, 2009 | 6,444 views | 6 Comments » | Tweet
My parents are always bugging me about my sleeping habits. They say I need to go to bed BEFORE MIDNIGHT (their definition of a “reasonable time”).
Throughout high school, I routinely stayed up past midnight working on my homework, websites, or just reading articles and listening/watching podcasts.
Despite my best efforts to sleep early, it was all too easy to find justification for staying up just one more hour. I would stumble upon some cool video or article, have an idea for a website feature — and that always took priority over sleep.
Take tonight for instance. I’m posting this message at 5:00AM. And you know what the best part is? I have psuedo-scientific evidence to prove that my night-owl habits are actually good for me.
I stumbled upon this short piece in the January 2009 issue of Wired Magazine, which proves that being a night-owl is AWESOME, and good for you too:
1 // You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were “well rested” actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.2 // Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.3 // Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You’ll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.
P.S. Mom and Dad: if you’re reading this, then you should know I am totally, completely, absolutely kidding about this article… you know I would never, never, never, stay up so late at night… right?
Hey dude, cool website, interesting stuff indeed. Guess how I found out about it? Stanfordwho, don’t you just love it? But yeah I was just looking for you email address so I could send you an email, which reminds me, I better get back to that…
Ha! Nice, though, on the flip side, people who WORK during the night may actually suffer from lack of communication with others (there was some scientific word, whatever) but true.
Very true about stumbling upon something or getting an idea, you just HAVE to find out more, if you don’t you’ll be thinking all night and not get any sleep at all!
It’s a good and a bad thing.
that “but true” – I forgot to take it out.
Well, I guess in your and my case, it’s better for me to stay up late, since that means it will be daytime in Australia, and that’s usually when we chat, eh?
Could not agree with you more. I have found that by sleeping from 4am to 8am and from 3pm to 7pm, I am well rested and able to work harder in a more focused enviroment(my house is pretty quite around midnight). Awesome stuff. Found you on some random facebook link haha.
Now, I’m proud of myself that I’m one of them.