A new study suggests that extreme early risers, people who are up and about pre-dawn, are simply listening to what their bodies are telling them.
The study's lead author, neurologist Dr Louis Ptáček told Jim Mora the study all started with a woman who had come to their clinic at the University of Utah, after people claimed she was depressed and antisocial for waking up before dawn.
Dr Louis Ptáček Photo: supplied
Dr Ptáček says the woman had told them that when she was younger she used to get up at 4am but as she got older began to wake up even earlier, and found this to be an undesirable trait.
“She didn’t like going to bed so early and then wake up when it was, in her words, ‘cold dark and lonely’.
“She’s not an insomniac, she sleeps soundly when she sleeps, but she wakes up spontaneously in very early morning hours.”
The clinic decided to clone a gene and found a variant in it among her family members that prompted this sleeping pattern, termed Advanced Familial Sleep Phase [AFSP].
“But there are other people in the same family who have the same genetic variant and the same gene who feel virtuous for being morning larks. So whether or not you view it as a positive thing or negative thing or indifferent to it, is really in the eye of beholder,” Dr Ptáček says.
But the sleep pattern may be more common than we believe, he says.
“Our conservative estimate of the familial advanced sleep phase from this study is one in 500, or 0.2 percent, but in fact we think it might be as much as twice that, 0.4 percent, one in 250 or one in 300.”
People with AFSP also have measures, like temperature and melatonin, at advanced levels relative to the general population and the solar day, he says.
Dr Ptáček says it’s simply a matter of our biological clocks ticking away.
“It’s all about proteins being turned on and off and then those proteins doing stuff and then being degraded and the cycle starts over again. In the case of [AFSP] people, the cycle in the cell that we can measure in the laboratory is faster … than in the average person who maybe goes to bed at midnight and wakes up at eight.”
Although one distinction between night owls and extreme larkers is that night owls are more likely to struggle with sleep deficits, he says.
“Adolescents and young adults have a biological tendency to be more night owls than they will be when they get to be 30.
“In some ways, it’s kind of crazy, schools like mine when I was growing up started at 8am, that can be a problem if you can’t fall asleep until 4am or 3am and then you have to wake up at 7am with an alarm clock – then you are more likely to be sleep deprived.
“The familial advanced sleep phase people even if they’re waking up at 4am they’re going to get to work on time, and so they tend to fit better with the social conventions, like school and work start times.”
Instead of going about to find a solution “to fix” sleeping patterns, he says it’s more important to live in harmony with our biological clocks.
“They [people with AFSP] go about and function very well in their lives and as long as they’re happy and healthy and doing well, we don’t feel there’s anything we need to do to try and help them.
“We also know of folks who maybe want to sleep ‘til 11 or 12, they might do tremendous work late at night when the early birds are sleeping… so I think the more important question is are you living in harmony with your biological clock or are you bucking it all the time?”
