14 DAY TRIAL // Being a night owl can be difficult with the modern social clock that requires us to wake up early each morning.
The evening-type sleeper relies on alarm clock, struggles to wake up, feels best in the afternoon and can stay up late. The night owls not only indulge themselves into bed every weekday, but they also recover with an extra hour or two at the weekend the missing sleep hours accumulated during the week.
Researcher Sarah-Jane Paine from Massey Universitythe, Wellington, New Zealand, has assessed the sleeping habits of 31 volunteers aged 30 to 49. The subjects were assigned into morning type and evening type, after they previously completed a questionnaire, and put movement recorders on their wrists to measure their sleeping times.
The morning type (early risers, which can do complex tasks or exercise in the morning, but fing it difficult to stay up late) had, on average, some extra 40 minutes of sleep time at the weekend than during the week.
But the night owl's (evening type) sleeping time was with an extra hour and 20 minutes' longer during the weekend days. They usually got out of bed on average around 9.10am on Saturday and Sunday, while the evening type presented a waking up time in the weekend at about 8.20 a.m. "The bigger catch-up for evening types may be due to their having to fit uncomfortably into a day-time schedule of family and work life," said Ms Paine, a doctoral student at Massey's Sleep-Wake Research Center.
"While maintaining an 8-to-5 job, an evening-type person probably still goes to bed later, because physiologically they might not be able to get to sleep any earlier. But because of their job they wake earlier than they prefer. Maintaining work means they are cutting short their sleep by maybe one to two hours every day. Therefore at the weekend they need to catch up if they don't need to get up early", said Paine. "Inadequate sleep had been linked with obesity and diabetes, possibly through the effects of the sleep hormone melatonin on hormones related to appetite", she said.
An analysis revealed that 25 % of the adults between 30 to 49 are framed in the evening types, 25 % fit the morning type, while 50 % of the adults do not encase in any of these types. On average, the adults' sleep time was found just less than 7 hours daily.