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I don't know where the excess energy came from,
but my mother insists that it's the unfortunate consequence
of eating candy bars and sugar cereals.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show,
does society favor early birds overnight owls?
Well, you're taking a bird metaphor
that probably has nothing to do with actual people.
Steven, we have an email from a listener named Abby
and I'd like to read it to you.
Are you awake enough to hear it?
Because it's morning.
It is morning.
We don't always record in the mornings, we should say.
We don't, but as an early riser,
which I know you to be,
I kind of knew you'd be awake for it.
You wake up at some ridiculously early
single digit number, yes?
I have been a very early riser
for the vast majority of my life,
although I'm trying now to get more sleep.
So sometimes I will sleep in until, you know,
6.30 or 7, which feels so luxuriantly criminal.
But I usually do wake up quite early,
between 5 and 5.30, which to me, that's just normal.
That is really early.
No, no, no, this is the thing.
You think it's normal, it is not normal.
Okay, let me read you Abby's question.
Abby writes, dear Angela and Steven,
I have always felt like our society favored early risers.
You know, early bird gets the worm.
I've recently heard a new version of this.
Quote, the early bird gets the worm,
but it's the second mouse who gets the cheese, unquote.
Have you ever heard that phrase?
I have not heard that.
So wait, the idea is that the first mouse
gets killed in the mouse trap?
Yeah, I think the idea is that the late sleeping mouse
who like gets up around 11 or something gets the cheese
after the first mouse gets snapped.
Let's make a pact right now.
We're not going to count this weird second mouse
cheese trap thing against Abby.
No, we get you.
And here Abby writes, so my question is,
do early birds really end up doing better?
And is this because people who want to get up early
are naturally proactive or because people are more
productive in the morning and which is each of you?
I love Abby's questions.
I like how she surrounds a question
with a bunch more questions,
which I think is such a good practice.
Russian doll-like.
Why don't we start with her last question first?
She wants to know which each of us are.
You already drug that out of me.
I think you are a relatively early bird, yes?
Guessing my chronotype.
And that is the fancy word, by the way,
for your quote unquote natural clock.
Are you somebody who naturally starts to become alert
early in the morning?
Or are you somebody whose chronotype is later,
you call them owls and larks.
You have correctly pegged me, Steven, as a lark.
I am somebody who wakes up before Alexa tells me to.
It's usually the first raise of dawn and sometimes
before then, so I rarely get up with my alarm,
which is set for 7.30.
Today I woke up at about 6.30 maybe.
But you know, I have to hesitate here
because I ordered my college application recently.
Did you know that for many schools,
you can literally email the registrar
and ask them for your own college application?
I did not.
And you did this willingly?
Yeah.
You weren't blackmailed into it
or someone wasn't questioning
whether you actually went to college.
No, no, I thought it would be really cool
for me to see what I had written
in my college applications.
Wow, tell me more.
How was it?
First I'll say that my guidance counselor
didn't think much of me.
I was looking at her ratings and I was like,
how did I even get into school?
Wow.
So you know what my application essay was entitled?
It was called Confessions of a Teenage Owl.
And I can read you parts of it.
It's not long actually.
I'd love to hear it.
All right.
My parents are convinced that they've raised an owl,
not a 17 year old daughter.
I admit that I am a creature of the night
with nearly no respect for the semi-comatose state
which most of us call sleep.
To me, sleep is like being dead for eight hours every night
and worst of all, it's a needless waste of time.
Accordingly, I succumb to Mr. Sandman
for only four hours per night.
As far as I can tell, I'm just as healthy
and twice as happy for it.
This nasty habit of staying up
into the wee hours of the night began during childhood.
Under strict orders to be in bed by 9.30,
I would sneak downstairs and hide behind the couch,
listening to Johnny Carson and praying
that my parents wouldn't turn around to discover me.
I don't know where the excess energy came from
but my mother insists that it's the unfortunate consequence
of eating candy bars and sugar cereals.
Whatever the reason, I am always the last to bed
and the first to wake everyone else up
when morning rolls around.
I realize of course that most people
do not share my contempt for sleep,
so I take pains to tiptoes quietly as possible
when prowling around the house at three in the morning.
Out of consideration for the unconscious members
of my family, I turn down Dave Letterman's voice
to a bare whisper and munch on my potato chips
as silently as I can.
Even after Dave is turned in, I sit at the kitchen table
and indulge myself in the luxury
of pure uninterrupted thought.
The ideas that pop into a teenager's head
at that ungodly hour range from the bizarre,
how to outsmart a sock eating washing machine
to the inspired, a new idea for a painting I'm working on.
Early morning thoughts are fragile things.
I've learned to scribble them down in my journal
before finally going to bed.
I must admit that this extra four hour stretch
gives me a considerable edge over my soporific peers.
After all, I have four more hours to keep up
on current events, organize my schedule,
and contemplate the last theory of calculus we learned.
If necessary, I can stay up all night studying
for the killer biology test without stumbling
into school the next day, bleary eyed and listless,
as do many members of the class.
Four hours may not seem like a terribly significant
amount of time, but considering that sleep
is like temporary death, they add about 11 years to my life.
Okay, so first of all, I can see why Harvard
wanted to admit you.
Because I was manic?
They're thinking, well, plainly, she cares so much
about accomplishment that she's willing
to basically not sleep, and that's the kind of person,
at least in 1987, they would really want.
Now, what's interesting to think about,
you literally wrote that sleep is a needless waste of time.
It would be really hard to find anyone
in the medical or scientific fields today
who would not want to delete that sentence.
I was a brash 17-year-old.
So now, I can imagine an admission officer reading that
and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no.
This is someone who is pursuing accomplishment
at the expense of her personal physical
and perhaps mental health, and we don't want
to be responsible for encouraging that.
Don't you think that that would be a response today?
Oh my gosh, completely.
The Nobel Prize in medicine in 2017 was awarded-
Yeah, circadian rhythms and sleep.
Right, so there is a kind of sleep revolution,
as Arianna Huffington calls it, and frankly,
at this age, I'm trying to get more sleep.
But I will tell you this.
I have known a few sleep experts,
and I'm thinking about David Dinges,
who is a world-renowned sleep researcher at Penn.
I told him my four-hour night story about my teenage years,
and he, I think, was quite skeptical
that could possibly be true,
certainly for the vast majority of people,
and he likes seven as a minimum
for what could plausibly be understood
as a healthy amount of sleep at the low end.
But he did allow, by the way,
that there are individual differences in sleep need.
There are also individual differences in chronotype.
I'm looking here at a paper from 2017,
published in PLOS One from Public Library of Science.
This is a paper trying to look at the distribution
of chronotypes in the US population by age and sex.
The author's right.
12 years of pooled diary data were used
from the American Time Use Survey.
We observed a near-normal distribution overall
and within each age group.
So Angela, can you just quickly define
what a near-normal distribution means?
It's essentially a bell curve
where there's a peak in the middle,
and then that's kind of like your average person,
and then it slopes down on the side.
You can imagine the Liberty Bell.
That means that there are some people
who are really far to the right,
there's some people who are really far to the left,
but it slopes up towards the middle.
Perfect, okay.
The distribution's mean value
is systematically different with age,
shifting later during adolescence,
showing a peak in lateness at around 19 years,
and then shifting earlier thereafter.
In other words, everything we've always heard
about teenagers' bodies gravitating
towards staying up late,
like 17 or 18-year-old Angela Duckworth in that essay,
there is biological evidence for that,
or at least time-use evidence
that supports the biological argument.
But then, listen, men are typically later chronotypes
than women before 40, but earlier types after 40.
So that's interesting.
I wonder if that's related to testosterone, maybe?
Menopause?
I don't know.
Are finding that adolescents are, on average,
the latest chronotypes,
supports delaying school start times
to benefit their sleep and circadian alignment.
So I think we are seeing more and more people
embrace this advice.
Well, I don't know, more and more.
A few.
In 2017, the Seattle School District
delayed the start time for secondary schools
from 7.50 to 8.45.
So, you know, almost an hour.
Researchers from the University of Washington
and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
decided to use the change to measure sleep-wake cycles.
The median sleep duration increased by 34 minutes,
and they noted that the delay
had measurable benefits for students.
You know Rand, the think tank?
I do.
They concluded, based on all this research
on chronotypes and the natural adolescent shift
towards a later waking up time,
they estimated that there would be $8.6 billion
of economic gains in productivity
simply by shifting middle and high school start times
to be later in the day.
You know, one of the things in the Nobel Prize
being awarded for this work
that I think should be impressed upon all of us
is that this is really a biological thing.
This is not a decision that you make
to be a morning person or an evening person.
Even plants have biological clocks.
It's because the planet Earth rotates on its axis.
And so there is day and there is night.
And there are times in the 24-hour period
that it's advantageous to be aroused, awake, vigilant,
looking for food, looking for mating opportunities.
But the idea is that at the most primitive level,
all living organisms have to anticipate and adapt
to this rotation of the Earth
and the presence or absence of the sun.
And so I just want to say that for any of us
who are like, why don't you just be a morning person?
This is extremely hardwired.
Okay, so the question that Abby's asking I think
is really an important one,
which is if one is not an early bird,
is one penalized in the world?
We actually touched on this a bit
in a Freakonomics Radio episode
some years back about sleep.
There's a Danish economist named Jens Banka
who wrote a paper in 2012 called
Do Morning Type People Earn More than Evening Type People?
How Chronotypes Influence Income.
He writes, the analysis showed
that morning relative to evening types
earned significantly more
and that morningness benefited men in particular.
So this answers one of her questions directly.
It's correlational data, by the way.
I don't know that we can say because anything, right?
That's a good point.
There's a correlation between being an early bird
and having, actually, by the way, lots of outcomes.
It's not just income, it's like happiness and productivity.
And what about health as well?
I've got to believe.
And by the way, anything that is going to be correlated
with income is probably correlated with these other things.
Again, just because they tend to be correlated.
So I think we don't know whether it is either
because, as Abby wonders,
these people tend to be the productive people.
So it's just a spurious correlation
or whether society is structured
in a way that favors the early birds.
So I think we can say there is a tendency
for early birds to get the worm,
but we don't know whether it's because the worms
are laid out for them on a buffet early
or whether they tend to be different kinds of people.
Right, so as with shifting school times,
you could imagine there should be a discussion
around shifting work time to not just shifting,
injecting flexibility.
If there's one thing we've learned from COVID,
it's that a lot of different people are able to
and prefer to work in very different ways than the norm.
And I also think that a lot of sleep patterns
have shifted, obviously, during COVID,
and that there's a lot to be learned from that.
I mentioned this Danish economist Jens Banka
that we spoke with some years ago
about chronotypes.
He also told us back then that Denmark
and some other places were starting to experiment
to shift work times a little bit
to make it more flexible for more people.
And you can imagine this would have
a lot of potential upsides,
not just for people who tend to not do well
when they have to wake up early,
but also for parents
or for anyone who's taking care of family and so on.
And it just made me think about
how rigid systems like here we are,
we're a corporation and we have a place
where you come to work
and we have a time when you come to work
and you come to work from nine to five,
Monday through Friday at this place.
That's the model that existed in a lot of places until 2020.
And now it's been blown apart
and people are trying to figure out
how to put it back together again.
I do look at some examples from nature
as long as we're talking about early birds versus night owls.
And you can think about it as an opportunity
for a sort of balance or even a differentiation.
Like in the animal kingdom,
it is true that hawks, for instance,
and owls can hunt in the same place
for the same animals without conflict.
And that's because hawks are diurnal
and owls are nocturnal.
So, okay, you're gonna say,
well, you're taking a bird metaphor
that probably has nothing to do with actual people,
but I would argue that maybe we have a little bit
to learn from the birds there
and that there is some sort of balance
or flexibility to be achieved
if for no other reason than we know
that there are a lot of people out there
who are chronotypically not set up to thrive
in an early morning environment.
Yeah, I think that we could say
that one of the big silver linings of COVID
is that we had a force experimentation
and this research shows that people
did shift their sleeping patterns.
And essentially what you find is
that when given the opportunity
to have more flexibility,
because you're not coming into the office at 9 a.m.,
people did shift their waking times in general to be later,
more like their weekends than their weekdays.
So, it's a big experiment
and there are individual differences
that we can't know when you hire somebody
and so why not create a workplace
or a societal rhythm that allows for more flexibility?
I think that's a great idea, President Dubner.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions,
Stephen and Angela discuss what to do
if your chronotype doesn't compliment
the way society is structured.
Oh crap, he emailed me at five,
I slept until seven, I better answer right away.
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Before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation
about individual sleep differences,
let's hear some of your thoughts on the topic.
We asked listeners to let us know the benefits
and detriments of being an early bird versus a night owl.
Here's what you said.
Hi, Stephen and Angela.
My name is Ana and I'm an early riser.
I really like the feeling of being awake
before the rest of the world is.
It kind of feels like my private alone time.
It also makes me feel, I'm not gonna lie,
a little bit better than other people.
And when I go for a run and see other early risers,
I feel like we're all part of this team
of superior individuals.
So while I do think early to bed,
early to rise is the better option,
I don't want everyone else to start doing it
because it's only for us special folks.
Hello, my name is Bethany Comine
and I'm from Massachusetts.
I grew up a night owl because of late nights
in high school and college.
So I thought that's what was working for me.
A few years ago, I switched my sleep schedule,
wake before seven and asleep by 11.
Instead of using the hours at the end of the night
to do essentially nothing productive,
those hours were now being used to watch the sunrise,
make proper coffee, listen to the news,
to go away at personal projects.
For me, being an early bird means setting myself up
for the day, whereas being a night owl
fixated on some of those undesirable habits
like snacking or hours of video games
or any other salve I could find
to ease the stress of the day,
which to me feels like addressing the symptom
rather than the cause.
I think it's time we put the saying,
the early bird gets the worm to bed for once and for all.
As a night owl with chronic insomnia,
I've struggled since my teenage years
with the nine to five world.
Being able to work from home for the last two years
during the pandemic has been a game changer for me.
I can sleep in, work late and no one is the wiser.
Why is it better to get all your work done early
and then conk out by 4 p.m.?
Many creative people are night owls.
Perhaps that's why entertainment takes place at night,
often the later the better.
I've also been told that in the early days of mankind,
night owls guarded the camps and kept people safe.
Surely that's worth something,
even in this modern day and age.
That was, respectively, Anna Gefarina, Bethany Comine,
and Glenna Ford, thanks to them
and to everyone who sent us their thoughts.
Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation
about how different chronotypes fit into societal structures.
You know what's another great idea?
It's something that you do
and I'm going to steal it from you.
So it has to do with email
and it has to do with a little slogan
that you now attach to your emails.
You know what I'm talking about?
I do.
So here's the thing, I love email
because I think it's extremely functional
and it's not very invasive.
I'm not calling you,
which means you have to answer the phone right now.
I'm not texting or slacking you,
which means you get an alert right now
with an expectation of an immediate response,
all of which I find to be
somewhere between obnoxious and noxious, okay?
Yeah.
Now, that said, I send a lot of emails
and because I'm up early,
I send a lot of emails early at 5 a.m., let's say.
Yeah, I've gotten those early emails from you, Stephen.
And the reason I always feel okay
about sending those early emails,
even to colleagues of mine who I know
are not going to be working until 9 or 10
or even 11 in some cases,
is that it's just an email
and it doesn't require an immediate response.
But it turns out that some people,
when they get an email from someone else
that's sent early, they think,
oh, I should respond immediately.
Let's say somebody gets up at seven
and they see I've sent them a work email at five,
but they don't typically work till 10.
Should they feel compelled to deal with the email?
My answer would be, of course not.
I understand that you work when you work,
but it turns out that that understanding that I had
was not actually an understanding,
that people would think, oh crap, he emailed me at five,
I slept until seven, I better answer right away.
So what you do now,
which I love, is you write at the end of every email,
my work hours may not be your work hours,
reply if you want, when you want.
So when did you add that and what's been the effect?
I added that relatively recently,
but I want to give credit to Seagal Barsad,
who was a wonderful friend of mine.
The recently late Seagal Barsad.
Who passed away too early at age 56
and was one of my closest friends.
And she was not only a world-class scientist
who studied emotion and empathy,
but also just was a paragon
of emotional intelligence and empathy.
So I noticed that Seagal,
this incredibly empathic person,
closed every one of her emails.
My working hours may not be your working hours.
Please do not feel obligated to reply
outside of your normal work schedule.
And I made my own riff on that.
Mine says reply if you want to, when you want to,
borrowing from a psychologist friend,
Walter Michelle, who's also passed away,
whenever he would do experiments with little children,
instead of telling them to do anything,
he said, if you want to, when you want to.
So this is my homage to Seagal Barsad
and a little bit to Walter Michelle also.
Was Seagal an early bird or a night owl?
She was a famous night owl.
So Seagal would not be sending you emails
at five in the morning.
Seagal would be calling you at midnight
to talk about whatever was going on.
So Seagal was affectionately, famously known
as being the night owl of all night owls.
I see.
So did she adopt that email slogan
because so many people got pissed off at her
for calling them at midnight?
I don't think that anybody was ever pissed off
at Seagal as far as I can tell.
The people who got her late night calls
remember them fondly.
And by the way, she did it with permission.
Okay.
She didn't try to rouse people out of bed.
But I think really what we're getting at
is not only flexibility and experimentation
and what we learned in COVID, we're getting an empathy.
People really are different.
You be you, Steven, and I'll be me.
Let me ask you one last question.
Let's say that I'm not an early bird,
but that I believe that the world really is set up
to benefit early birds.
I'm required to do certain things,
be certain places, et cetera, at a given time.
That means I have to get up earlier
than my body really wants to.
And I have a hard time going to bed early enough
to still get my six, seven, eight,
however many hours I want.
We've already agreed that maybe the best solution
would be for society to nudge itself
toward more flexibility to allow for different chronotypes.
In the interim, and especially this goes back
to Abby's question, can you suggest a way to nudge oneself
toward slightly adjusting your chronotype?
So not that long ago, a very good friend of mine
and a devoted NSQ listener named Austin Lin said,
have you ever heard of chronotype adjusting
from this Stanford neuroscientist named Andrew Huberman?
The answer, no, but he leads me to Huberman's podcast.
I start listening to it.
And what I picked up from it is that, yeah,
you can make some adjustments to your natural circadian clock
by essentially controlling light.
And what Huberman recommends is getting daylight
within 15 minutes of waking,
and that this is especially important to think about
during those winter months
when there are very few hours of daylight,
again, depending on where you live.
I took that advice so hard
and I tried to go for a walk in the morning.
I mean, that sometimes happens, that sometimes doesn't,
but there are different places in my house that I can work
where some of those rooms get more light than others.
My home office is on the lowest level.
It's essentially a basement level.
Everything's set up there, but since learning about that,
I actually take my laptop upstairs
and I work by a window that gets more light.
So I think the most important prescriptive recommendation
about how you can, until society catches up
and makes everything more flexible for us.
Quit your job.
Is to come over with your laptop
and hang out with me by this bay window.
I think that's the take-off.
But no, I think light is something
that you can be more deliberate about.
And by the way, Huberman also recommends
minimizing light exposure toward the end of the day.
So what this would mean is literally dimming the lights
in your house after a certain time.
And I've been more diligent about not being on my phone.
I try to read on one of those old kindles
that's only in black and white.
And I think it's been helpful.
And what was his advice for staying up
to watch late night comedy shows and eating potato chips?
Was that also a key component?
There's a list of foods that are most correlated
with having poor health.
And I think potato chips and french fries are on that list.
But they're so delicious.
So you're saying you don't eat them so much anymore?
Oh, no, no, I eat them anyway.
They're so delicious that I personally buy them
at least once a week.
Would you say that you eat them less, however,
than when you were 17?
You know, growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey,
all those late nights and all that Dave Letterman,
I have to say, I was the portrait
of poor nutritional hygiene.
I ate potato chips and candy bars and full sugared soda,
not to be recommended.
So if we consider your dietary habits,
your sleep habits, et cetera, et cetera,
the 50-year-old Angela Duckworth
is to the 17-year-old Angela Duckworth
as blank is to blank.
Oh, my gosh.
The 52-year-old Angela Duckworth
is to the 17-year-old Angela Duckworth
as the slightly tired menopausal mom
is to the bright-eyed bushy-tailed teen.
I guess that's literal.
That's not really going the analogy route.
That was very literal.
It was also a little bit depressing.
Yeah, I know.
I think I was just emoting.
The 52-year-old Angela is to the 17-year-old Angela
as the wise owl is to the early morning lark.
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
and now here's a fact check of today's conversation.
In the first half of the show,
Stephen and Angela joke that the second mouse gets the cheese
is an unusual extension of the phrase
the early bird gets the worm.
The original adage, the early bird catcheth the worm,
can be traced back to English historian William Camden's
1636 publication remains concerning Britain,
which contained a list of English proverbs,
including, trust is the mother of deceit
and the lame tongue gets nothing.
The origin of the second mouse gets the cheese
is unfortunately less clear.
According to the fact-checking website Quote Investigator,
the phrase may have first appeared
on a newsgroup message board in 1994.
A user with the handle Ernst Berg posted,
blessed is the second mouse for he shall inherit the cheese.
In 2012, the adage was added to Yale University Press's
Dictionary of Modern Proverbs.
Also, Stephen and Angela discuss a 2017 paper from PLOS One
titled, Chronotypes in the US, Influence of Age and Sex.
And they wonder why men are typically found
to have later chronotypes than women before the age of 40,
but earlier thereafter.
According to the authors, hormonal changes, Quote,
might act as modulators for an aging circadian system,
causing a slowdown in women between 35 and 50
and a speed up in men aged 55 to 65.
But factors like differences in familial responsibilities,
work regimens and psychological disorders
could also lead to a change in chronotypes.
Interestingly, the difference seems to disappear at age 79.
Later, Stephen says that hawks are diurnal
and owls are nocturnal.
While many owl species are in fact nocturnal,
some species like the northern pygmy owl
are active in the daytime.
And several species are neither diurnal nor nocturnal,
but crepuscular, meaning they're active
during dusk and dawn.
Finally, Stephen and Angela use the pronunciation
chronotype throughout the episode.
If you're used to saying chronotype
and are now concerned about looking stupid
after years of mispronunciation, fear not.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
both pronunciations are totally correct.
That's it for the fact check.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions,
how can you curb the damaging effects
of catastrophic thinking?
My dad spontaneously emoted, as he often did, disaster.
Was it his catchphrase, would you say?
He was a bit of a catastrophizer.
That's next week on No Stupid Questions.
For that episode, we want to know what strategies
help you calm down when you're feeling anxious.
Do you meditate, journal,
talk things through with a therapist?
Let us know what works for you.
To share your thoughts, send a voice memo
to NSQ at Freakonomics.com with the subject line anxiety.
Make sure to record someplace quiet
and please keep your thoughts to under a minute.
Maybe we'll include them on the show.
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Thanks for listening.
What share of all cheese in the world
do you think is attached to a mousetrap, would you say?
I don't know, but we had mice in a previous home
and having seen a lot of Tom and Jerry,
I put cheese, it totally didn't work.
Also, then it like attracts bugs.
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