People Who Sleep Late – Night Owls – Are Actually Smarter And More Creative

Are you guilty of being a night owl?

Ever been woken up by a yelling mom/wife and a buzzing phone that sends all your tired nerves to hell and back?

Ever been reprimanded again, and again for being late by a rather angry father and had to begin your day with a lecture on the advantages of a disciplined life? (Me too, all of these things.)

The saddest part of this entire thing is that you can never justify your actions to them: You cannot tell them that you were reading something informative or that you were learning web designing that might help you with a future internship.

But you know your mother will stop you at 2 am. That’s all she’ll hear. She’ll scold you for staying up late, threaten to take away your computer and tell you to start going to bed earlier.

Neither can you explain to your boss that reading about the tripartite war between the Pope, the Holy Roman Empire and the libertarian Italian City-States in the medieval ages is as interesting as making a presentation.

Everyone just wants you to suck it up and work. Get your life together.

This has always been the case for you: not much to wake up to but so much to stay awake late for.

That’s when ideas come and imaginative energies are freely flowing. You are the one who basks in the moonlight. And this doesn’t make you any less of a person.

According to research published in The Huffington Post, those who deviate from the normal sleep schedule are considered more intelligent. This finding is supported by research suggesting that those who create new evolutionary patterns (compared to those who stick with the normal patterns developed by our ancestors) are the most progressive.

And it is a known fact that the more progressive you are, the better your chances are to change the world.

Lead author of the study, Marina Giampietro, believes that this creativity is bred from the “development of a non-conventional spirit and of the ability to find alternative and original solutions.”
And it is a given that night owls are always more creative than early birds, because well, they have to and do make up for the daylight they waste.

The only difference between night owls and early crows is the cycle; It may look like the late risers are missing out on the morning hours, but the early risers are actually missing out on an entire night.

The night owls are ahead of the cycle and experiencing chunks of time that early risers sleep through. But night owls are in better moods throughout the day because they are content and satisfied with their activities all night.

According to the BBC, a team from the University of Westminster asked 42 volunteers to take saliva samples eight times during the day for two days. They took the first sample as soon as they woke up. Waking times ranged from 5.22 to 10.37am. Analysis of the saliva from the half who woke earlier – before 7.21am – showed they had higher levels of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, than those who woke later. Their cortisol levels remained high all day. Differences in the average number of hours asleep for the two groups could not account for this.

The researchers hope to discover whether high cortisol levels caused the early birds to wake early, or whether their hormone levels were high because of their early start.

Now in ending, what I’d like to point out is, it is a matter of perspective. As long as night owls are creative and productive in their own way, they are best left alone in their natural habitat.

They work well that way; and after all who knows, we might get another Da Vinci from among them!