Is it morning already?

King at SCSUScholars is interested in a new study on sleep patterns and how it ties into college students in his econ class. The study claims that it's hardwired into young people to stay up late and sleep in but once they hit the age of around 20, they start to get up earlier.

From the article:

To investigate how this "chronotype" varies throughout life, Till Roenneberg from the University of Munich, Germany, and his colleagues asked 25,000 people, aged between 8 and 90, a series of questions about what time they go to sleep and wake up
From this, the researchers calculated the average "mid-point" of each person's sleep - in other words, the time half way between when they go to sleep and when they wake up - on days when they had no work obligations.

The study figures that the time you go to bed and wake up when you don't have "work obligations" is the real time you would like to sleep/wake up. But I'm not so sure about that. I work 6 days a week right now, so Sunday is the only day I don't have "work obligations". I still usually get up pretty early on Sundays - sometimes around 8am. This isn't because I consider myself a morning person - it's because I've had "work obligations" the night before (and I usually run errands on Saturday after work as well) and I'm usually dog tired on Saturday night, so I get to bed early, thus meaning I get up early the next day. Secondly, even without "work obligations", I still have other obligations - Sunday is the first day of sales, so I usually do some shopping, and it's my one day to get homework done when I have night MBA classes going on. People around 22 not only tend to have jobs, which get in the way of sleeping, they also tend to move out on their own, which means additional responsiblities, more errands to run, and thus less ability to sleep until noon.


I have a unique perspective on the night/morning thing, because I used to work the second shift at my job - 1pm to 10pm most days. I loved those hours - sleep until 10 or 11am, go to sleep around 2 or 3 in the morning. Alas, the MBA program I'm taking only has night classes available, so I changed - and now I'm tired pretty much all the time.