--- title: Waking Up Early Isn't Necessarily Better For You description: People often think of themselves as early birds or night owls. But one isn't necessarily better than the other. canonical: https://time.com/6282822/better-to-be-morning-person/ author: Haley Weiss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-05-25T18:59:30.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:11.442Z article:section: Health og:title: Why Waking Up Earlier Isn't Necessarily Better og:description: Morning birds aren't morally superior to night owls. og:url: https://time.com/6282822/better-to-be-morning-person/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt421191ebcc88ff65/698a3d61929fadd05ebf9dd8/early-wakers-not-superior.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: early-wakers-not-superior og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Waking Up Earlier Isn't Necessarily Better twitter:description: Morning birds aren't morally superior to night owls. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt421191ebcc88ff65/698a3d61929fadd05ebf9dd8/early-wakers-not-superior.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Waking Up Earlier Isn't Necessarily Better > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: A Skin Patch Shows Promise in Treating Kids' Peanut Allergies [Watch (HLS stream): A Skin Patch Shows Promise in Treating Kids' Peanut Allergies](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/wbNFxHZx.m3u8) (2:13)  _Published 2023-05-15. Morning birds aren't morally superior to night owls._  by [Haley Weiss](https://time.com/author/haley-weiss/)  ## Haley Weiss May 25, 2023 6:59 PM UTC  Getty Images  by [Haley Weiss](https://time.com/author/haley-weiss/)  ## Haley Weiss May 25, 2023 6:59 PM UTC A favorite trope of sleep research is to divide the entire human population into two cute, feathered categories: early birds (also called larks) and night owls. Often, these studies link people’s natural sleep patterns—called their chronotype—with some waking behavior or personality trait. It doesn’t take long to see which team more often comes out on top. (Hint: it’s the one that catches the worm.) Research says that early birds are [happier](https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0027071), more [punctual](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-014-9246-1), [do better in school](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian-Vollmer-2/publication/256442084%5FMorningness%5Fis%5Fassociated%5Fwith%5Fbetter%5Fgradings%5Fand%5Fhigher%5Fattention%5Fin%5Fclass/links/5a22a2404585155dd41c7684/Morningness-is-associated-with-better-gradings-and-higher-attention-in-class.pdf), and [share more conservative morals](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Konrad-Jankowski-2/publication/350867964%5FMoral%5Ffoundations%5Fin%5Fchronotypes%5Fmorningness%5Fpredicts%5Fconservative%5Fmorality/links/6078105b8ea909241efe397b/Moral-foundations-in-chronotypes-morningness-predicts-conservative-morality.pdf). Night owls are more [impulsive](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-psychiatry/article/novelty-seekers-and-impulsive-subjects-are-low-in-morningness/9A3BABD26BBB290E77E1A510D952994E), [angry](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/07420528.2015.1128947), and likely to become [cyberbullies](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02723646.2017.1352918?journalCode=nbrr20); they have [shoddier diets](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/07420528.2012.699128) and, most critically, are [worse at kicking soccer balls](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24733938.2021.2014550). But can the population really be categorized so neatly? Or is the research painting an incomplete and overly moralistic picture? A [study](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284787) published May 24 in _PLOS ONE_ by a group of Polish researchers takes a fresh look at the [long-established link](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886908000974) between being an early riser and being conscientious by examining a separate but potentially important variable that might underlie the link: being religious. The team found that people who woke up earlier tended to score higher on all dimensions of religiosity, leading them to conclude that being religious could help explain why early risers are more conscientious and more satisfied overall. “Morningness” might be closely aligned with godliness, in part because certain religions practice early-morning prayer—so religion could be driving the link between rising early and being conscientiousness. Religion, of course, is just one under-examined variable that may be contributing to the link between sleep and waking behavior. Countless more exist—which suggests we’re probably thinking about the morning bird/night owl divide too starkly, in research and in real life. “I think most people would recognize that, in reality, \[chronotype is\] more of a continuous type of variable,” says Brian Gunia, a sleep researcher, professor, and associate dean at Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School. It exists on a spectrum: not everyone is always one or the other. But so much research uses this binary classification because people are usually able to self-identify that way, Gunia says. --- ### More from TIME --- **Read More**: [_Individual Circadian Clocks Might Be the Next Frontier of Personalized Medicine_](https://time.com/5876614/circadian-rhythm-study/) The bias that people who rise early are morally superior to evening people doesn’t just loom large in scientific research. It’s at the very heart of the U.S.’s founding principles of industry and hard work, says Declan Gilmer, a PhD student at the University of Connecticut who studies workplace psychology. “If someone gets up at 6 a.m., and they show up at work early, they’re viewed potentially as more committed,” he says. For his 2018 masters’ thesis, Gilmer asked people to imagine themselves as managers and review employees’ requests for easily accommodatable schedule changes based on a number of factors. He found that people acting as managers rarely treated chronotype-related scheduling requests—like asking to start and end the workday later when such a schedule didn’t interfere with meetings—as legitimate. And when night-owl employees made such requests, they viewed them much more negatively, even when they were just as productive as the early birds. Other recent [research](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15402002.2022.2032068) published in the journal _Behavioral Sleep Medicine_ found that people “perceived night owls as significantly more lazy, unhealthy, undisciplined, immature, creative, and young,” the study authors write. Yet a person’s sleep preference is far from fixed. Though it does have biological and genetic roots and “doesn’t vary from month to month or season to season,” says Fogel, “we know age is really important.” Chronotype can shift as you get older, he says, which means that research needs to control for things like age. “Some of the better work in the topic area has been trying to identify the genes that are most tightly linked to morningness and eveningness,” he says—genes that, if understood, could open the door to a more nuanced view of the topic. Perhaps the most important reason not to rely too heavily on the “research-backed” moral superiority of morning birds is that aspects of your personality (like how [hopeful](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-04698-003) and [creative](https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2019.0020) you are) and your own physiology (like how [focused](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001457515301251) you are) that are supposedly linked to your chronotype change throughout the day. Very few chronotype studies include information about the time of day during which the research was conducted, but Gunia’s research has found that this seemingly simple factor can change data a fair bit. In a 2014 [study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614541989?journalCode=pssa) of chronotype and ethical behavior, for example, “we found that morning people are most ethical in the morning, and evening people are most ethical in the evening, so maybe it’s more of a fit between chronotype and time \[of day\] than it is this idea that morning people are better or worse,” Gunia says. Studies that don’t take time of day into account “are missing half the equation.” Humans don’t always fit neatly into one of two categories, even when it comes to their sleep preferences. As researchers work toward a more individualized view, just remember: You don’t have to be a morning lark or a night owl. You can be any kind of bird you like—there are plenty of worms to go around. ## Transcript For the last 22, probably 25 years, we've seen a remarkable uptick in the number of new cases of peanut allergy being diagnosed. The current prevalence is about 2% of US children, which is not an insignificant amount of this has been a growing public health problem. This paper is addressing an unmet need in very young children, children under the age of four. As a way to help potentially treat any peanut allergy that does develop, peanut is sprayed onto the technology and then the technology is applied like a Band-Aid onto the skin, and it works through sort of sweat and absorption. We have a therapy that can potentially increase the amount of peanut that it will take for your child to react and ideally decrease the severity of any reaction once they get to that point of of of lowering that risk. That can be worn daily and you'll never have to eat peanut to get that benefit. You're going from under well, under a single peanut, you know, fractions of a peanut up to that much. So before you have a reaction so that that's clinically very meaningful for for a patient and for parents. From when I started as an allergist in 2006, we are light years ahead of the game. Back then, we really had nothing that we could tell a parent other than you'll need to avoid this for life. You'll need to carry emergency medicine for life, and you need to be very, very careful to avoid environmental exposures, even unintended ones. Now I look at the same child that I might have counseled in 2006, and there is you know, there's there's approved therapies, there are therapies in the pipeline. The future for that child is much, much brighter. There are a number of actual choices that these children may have in their future and how they can choose to be treated if they would like to. This is going through the regulatory process and the companies in touch with with the FDA trying to figure out the next steps. 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