You’ve heard the saying, “the early bird get’s the worm”. Well a new study by Philippe Peigneux, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, compared the performance of subjects who woke up around noon with subjects that routinely work up at 5-6am.
According to the article “Want to Get Ahead? Sleep In” at Globe and Mail.
After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention span, compared with the night owls. The early risers also felt sleepier and tended to perform tasks more slowly, compared with the night owls, when their level of alertness was measured.
This flies in the face of traditional thinking such as “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” -Ben Franklin. Research has shown that whether you naturally are an early or late riser is dictated by your genetic makeup. However, people who are naturally late risers are often forced or pressured by societal norms to wake up early, which causes sleep deprivation and this lack of sleep hurts performance. Natural late risers also tend to consume significantly more caffeine, probably due to being forced to fight their natural circadian clock, which can lead to chemical dependency or large swings in wakefulness.
According to the book Brain Rules by John Medina:
“Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.”
A set schedule for employees that requires that they show up at 8 am every day, may be robbing them of their most productive hours. It may increase productivity of workers if they are allowed to come in whenever they prefer, even if their start the day at noon.
Related Article
10 Benefits of Rising Early and How to Do It Zen Habits
Photo by IGNACIOLEO