![]() ![]() Use a sleep diary to record the time you naturally go to bed and wake up each day for a week, as well as your energy level throughout the day, ranking it from zero (extremely sleepy) to 10 (high energy) each hour.Make sure there’s nothing major getting in the way of obtaining quality sleep by brushing up on your sleep hygiene (that is, limiting blue-light exposure at night, minimizing caffeine intake late in the day, dropping the temperature in your bedroom, and so on).Then, she suggests following these three steps to see if any sleep pattern emerges that may fit into one of the above chronotypes: “A good way to determine your ‘sleep need’ is to do so on vacation, or whenever you don’t have specific demands, like work, impacting your sleep-wake schedule,” she says. That said, if you’d like to identify your general sleep chronotype, it’s essential to track your levels of sleepiness and wakefulness during a time in which you aren’t sleep-deprived, says clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Shelby Harris, PsyD, author of The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia. In fact, a recent study analyzing sleep patterns among 3,787 people during the COVID-19 lockdown showed that when people had more flexibility to self-select their sleep timing, most turned out to be evening types-which differs significantly from previous research showing that most people (in non-lockdown conditions) are morning types. Factors like your job, lifestyle, and diet, alongside elements of your sleep hygiene can easily shift it one way or the other. How to figure out your chronotypeĪlthough your sleep chronotype is, again, influenced by genetics, it’s worth noting that it’s far from set in stone, says Dr. The notable distinction here is that napper types tend to feel even sleepier in the afternoon than in the morning or the evening. Tal, however, there’s a slight caveat: Everyone will typically feel some sort of energy slump in the mid-afternoon, reflecting a general tendency for cortisol levels to dip around that time-so, if you feel just a bit less alert then, you might not jump to the conclusion quite yet that you’re a napper type. As you might guess, their cortisol-melatonin schedule is delayed, compared to the average: The wakefulness-promoting hormone is released later into the day, and the wakefulness-canceling hormone arrives later into the night, as well.Īccording to Dr. ![]() This is just the opposite of the above: People who fall into this camp are frequent pressers of the snooze button and tend to struggle with grogginess in the morning come nighttime, they usually feel more alert and stay that way for several hours after it gets dark. This means your cortisol-melatonin schedule happens earlier than average in the day: The wakefulness-promoting hormone is released sooner in the day, and the wakefulness-canceling hormone comes sooner at night, too. If you tend to open your eyes naturally before the buzz of your alarm, wake up early on weekends, or find it easy to transition into work mode early in the morning, you’re most likely a morning type. And while that stems largely from genetics, it also varies with age and environmental factors, making an understanding of all four chronotypes that much more important. Exactly when they do their thing is what drives a person's dominant sleep chronotype. While the presence of more natural light during the day typically drives the former and darkness at night drives the latter, both hormones may still fluctuate at different times among different people. Specifically, a release of the wakefulness-promoting hormone cortisol makes you feel alert, while a spike in the wakefulness-cancelling hormone melatonin makes you feel less alert (and, in turn, more sleepy). ![]() “The word ‘circadian’ comes from the Latin ‘circa diem’ or ‘about a day.’ And the rhythm affects when you feel awake or sleepy over the course of 24 hours, as the result of hormones released in the body,” says clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Joshua Tal, PhD. In general, differentiations between sleep chronotypes come down to when you naturally feel alert or sleepy throughout a day during which you aren’t sleep-deprived.
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