Personal anecdote here. I've read his book. It's good, it's interesting, and it made me realise how much more I should try to get more and better sleep. I'm a night person. For months I tried each and every technique out there to move my sleep schedule back since I have to wake up in the morning against my natural rhythm.
I started panicking and I went from 4-6h sleep per night + 8-10h on weekends to 2-4h during the week and about 6h on weekends. My whole life took a turn for the worst until I made the decision to stop the madness and go back to my previous, insufficient, sleep schedule.
This is not ideal by a long shot. I'm permanently sleep deprived, but at least not to the point where I can't even function.
> I mean isn't half of it that everyone has a chronotype?
I still don't buy this as an idea, an unchangeable genetic (?) marker that defines "night person" or "morning person". I think we make choices and habits, and these are really just a part of personality.
I'm almost positive that's bullshit because I spent half of my life as a "night owl", convinced it was just something inherent to me. After my wife took a job that had her waking up at 4am, and the requisite adjustments to her bedtime, I found myself totally fine with going to sleep at 10am or earlier everyday.
In a lot of ways an early bedtime, or an average bedtime, is preferable to staying up to the wee hours, but given the context I couldn't see the benefits until I had experienced it myself for a few months. So in my opinion, if there is some kind of genetic marker for chronatype, it's either not very influential, only expressed in a subset of the populace or largely BS.
I buy that it might be A Thing but have a strong suspicion that 90+% of modern "night people" are just addicted to the 24/7 casino-bright circus that is modern home entertainment and nighttime lighting (as most of us are) and would stop being "night people" if you took that away.
Personal anecdote here. I've read his book. It's good, it's interesting, and it made me realise how much more I should try to get more and better sleep. I'm a night person. For months I tried each and every technique out there to move my sleep schedule back since I have to wake up in the morning against my natural rhythm.
I started panicking and I went from 4-6h sleep per night + 8-10h on weekends to 2-4h during the week and about 6h on weekends. My whole life took a turn for the worst until I made the decision to stop the madness and go back to my previous, insufficient, sleep schedule.
This is not ideal by a long shot. I'm permanently sleep deprived, but at least not to the point where I can't even function.