Day or night? Are you a night or day person?

We can increase our productive capacity by understanding our biological rhythm.

Hello friends!

There are many attempts to explain the function of sleep. Curious as children, we might wonder why we sleep? Why don’t we stay awake 24 hours a day? The most plausible explanation is that we sleep for our body to recover, in a cycle that goes from maximum activity to maximum passivity.

And it is precisely this alternating cycle between sleep and wakefulness that helps us understand a simple rule of any investigation to increase our productivity.

Try to answer the question: what time of day or night can you produce more? Can you have more focus and attention? Can you make everything you have to do flow with ease?

Some people will say, between 8 and 10 am. And, at the other extreme, some people will say: between 8:00 pm and 10:00 pm (or even later, between midnight and two).

Night People vs Day People

To classify these two types of biological rhythms, we call the person productive in the morning daytime and the person productive at night time nocturnal. So far so good. The problem is that the schedules we have to meet are not always consistent with our pace.

If I’m a nocturnal person and I have to wake up at six in the morning to start studying at 7:30 am, I can even manage, but I won’t have the maximum of my active capacity. It’s like I’m half asleep and half awake.

Now, if I’m a daytime person – and I like to sleep and wake up early – and I have to take a college test at 9:00 pm, I can also do well, however, I won’t have the same ease if this test were given at 9 am.

In this sense, as our society still largely inherits the times of the Industrial Revolution, in which everyone had to punch the time card at the same time, we have an external condition that can go against the internal biological rhythm.

Someone who wakes up at noon isn’t necessarily going to be a bum, is he? It’s like Einstein said:We are all geniuses. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb treeshe will spend his whole life believing himself to be stupid.”

So what to do?

First, the ideal is to calmly assess what your true biological rhythm is, because, to the extent that we are forced by culture to follow certain standards, we may not even know for sure what is the best time to sleep and wake up.

A tip that helps is to ask parents or family what time we slept when we were babies and children. Of course, a child sleeps a lot up to a certain age, but the question is whether we tend to sleep earlier or whether we tend to sleep later. For example, until I was 5, 6 years old I couldn’t stay awake after 9 pm. This is an indication that I am a daytime person, who prefers to sleep early and wake up early and has peak productivity in the morning.

I say that we should go back to the past to see what our tendency to sleep was because between the two extremes there are people who manage to adapt relatively well, that is, in a period of their lives they sleep late and wake up late and then pass sleeping early and waking up early.

The heart of the question is not whether or not the person can wake up and sleep at the time that their school, college, work or whatever requires, but what would be their sleep nature. Do you understand?

One way to look at this is: if there were no external requirements – like when you’re on vacation and don’t have any commitments – what time would you go to bed and wake up? What time would you sleep if you were all alone and in an isolated place with no internet?

Second, once you’ve figured out whether you’re a day or night person, the next step is to adapt the world to you. Evidently, in many contexts, we cannot choose very much. If you are a night person and your work or school period starts in the morning – what can you do? Not a lot.

But knowing and keeping this information in mind, you can plan changes. In later situations, you can find a school that offers afternoon or evening classes (either way you will have more time to sleep in the morning) or you can negotiate at work to arrive later or even create and look for a job where you are you the person who sets the deadlines and times.

And the same thing is valid for those who are daytime. Knowing this fact, you can adapt your routine to your rhythm.

For example, let’s say you’re a day person but go to college at night. Regardless, the best time for you to study, review material and research will be in the morning. Therefore, try to force yourself to wake up earlier as this time will be the most productive for you.

Questions, suggestions, comments, please write below!

Related