Early Bird: Why Some People Wake at Five Without an Alarm

Adam, a design engineer from Leeds, wakes at 5:45 even on a Saturday. There is no alarm involved. He wakes, makes coffee, and by 6:30 he is sitting over the drawing he could not crack on Friday afternoon; by eight it is finished. Colleagues ask him how he does it and he has no answer, because he does not do anything at all.

Being a morning person is not the product of discipline. It is a setting of the body clock that runs a little ahead of most of the population, and for someone who has it, getting up at six costs roughly what getting up at nine costs an owl. The interesting question is not the early start, though. It is what the lark pays for it in the evening.

A lark has no extra willpower, only a shifted phase

Inside the brain runs a clock that governs body temperature, hormone levels and alertness, and its cycle lasts about twenty-four hours. People do not differ in the length of that cycle but in its phase, meaning where its peak and its trough fall in real time. In a lark the whole curve is pushed forward, easily by two or three hours compared with an owl.

In practice it looks like this. Melatonin, the hormone the body starts producing once it gets dark outside and the system prepares for sleep, is released earlier in a lark, body temperature bottoms out earlier, and in the morning it climbs again earlier. That is why a lark wakes at six without an alarm, and why at a quarter to ten in the evening nobody will convince them the film is still worth finishing.

Where does the phase come from? Partly from genes. Twin studies put the heritability of morning and evening preference at roughly half, so if your mother has been eating breakfast at six for as long as you can remember, that is no accident. The clearest illustration came from the team around Louis Ptáček, who in 1999 described a family with a markedly advanced rhythm: its members fell asleep around half past seven in the evening and woke around half past four in the morning, across generations. Two years later, working with Ying-Hui Fu's laboratory, they traced it to a rare variant in one of the clock genes. An ordinary lark has nothing in common with that family, but the case shows that phase really is set by biology and not by a resolution made the night before.

The second factor is age, and it is surprisingly powerful. Till Roenneberg and his team processed data from tens of thousands of people in 2004 and found a clear curve: through adolescence the rhythm shifts further and further towards the evening, peaks around the age of twenty, slightly earlier in women than in men, and from that point creeps back towards the morning for the rest of life. That is why the people you meet in the park at six are mostly pensioners, and why almost every parent of a teenager is convinced their child is an owl. A good number of those owls will wake up thirty years later as larks.

A rough picture of where each type sits looks something like this. These are ranges rather than norms, and plenty of people live on the border.

There is a second axis running alongside this one, and it tends to get forgotten: how steady or how flexible your rhythm is. Two larks who get up at the same time can differ enormously in what a single broken night does to them. One is knocked sideways for three days, the other is fine by lunchtime. How the two axes interact is covered in the guide to chronotypes.

What the morning earns a lark

The proverb about the early bird catching the worm holds a piece of truth, just a slightly different piece than people usually assume. The early bird does not get further because it is more diligent than the rest. It gets further because the surrounding world has laid the day out to fit it exactly.

The first advantage is banal and also the largest: between five and seven, nobody wants anything from you. No email arrives, the phone stays quiet, and nobody turns up with "have you got a minute". A lark gets two hours of uninterrupted work before most people are even out of bed, and that is a kind of time you can barely buy later in the day.

Adam describes the difference simply. The same task that defeated him for three hours on Friday afternoon took him ninety minutes on Saturday morning. He did not grow wiser overnight. He did it at a time when his head was up and nobody was talking into it.

The second advantage is purely organisational: the world is built for larks. School starts at eight, most meetings get booked for nine, and the council office is only open in the morning. A morning type never has to adapt to that timetable, because they happen to match it, and they save the enormous amount of energy an owl burns just to look functional at nine.

The third thing is reputation. Whoever arrives first and answers email at seven comes across as reliable, even if the afternoon is a write-off. There is something to it beyond impressions, though: a meta-analysis by Ioannis Tsaousis from 2010, which pulled together dozens of studies on personality and daily preference, found a link between morning orientation and conscientiousness. The link was weak, so it does not follow that larks make better workers. It suggests instead that the world's schedule suits them and they are not fighting themselves. An owl with the same conscientiousness simply spends it elsewhere.

The advantage has a floor to it as well. Anyone who settles into the role of the person who is online at seven gets handed that role as a permanent duty, and the people around them will gradually pour meetings and calls into the morning window. A lark who does not guard their best hours has given them away within a few months and is left with nothing but the early start.

The evening that cannot be stretched

For two extra hours in the morning, a lark pays with two evening hours that are not really theirs. Around eight the shutters come down and cannot be talked out of it, and everything that follows happens at half quality. The second shift of the day, the one after dinner, is often misery for a morning type: three paragraphs read and no idea what was in them, or an email that gets rewritten in the morning anyway.

The social side is worse. Most of adult life takes place at exactly the hours when a lark shuts down. Dinner at eight, a concert at nine, a party that gets going after ten, the pint after the match. A morning type either does not go at all, or goes and leaves at the point where it is only starting, and in both cases hears the same remark.

A question to sit with: how many times this year have you been the first to leave? If three or more occasions come to mind, and each time you explained that you "have to be up early" even when you did not, that is a fairly precise indicator of which side of the axis you are on.

Then there is the part almost nobody expects. A late night hurts a lark twice over. Not only do they fall asleep late, but the body clock wakes them at the usual hour, because it never heard about last night. An owl sleeps in until eleven after a broken night and pays off some of the debt. The lark lies there at seven with their eyes open, tired and annoyed, and there is no catching it up.

The second axis comes into this too. A lark with a steady rhythm carries one late night for two or three days and notices it in their mood and their patience, while a lark with a flexible rhythm is straight by lunchtime and would wonder what the fuss was about. If you are the steady sort, there is no point treating it as a weakness; there is a point in planning around it and putting nothing that matters on the day after a wedding or a night train.

The same logic explains one counterintuitive effect. Everyone remembers the rule that flying east is the harder direction, yet for a lark it tends to be the reverse: the trouble comes flying west, where they have to stay awake several hours longer than they naturally would. Their clock shifts backwards, into the evening, only reluctantly. For the same reason morning types cope badly with the autumn return to standard time, when the day effectively gets longer, while the spring shift forward bothers them much less. Owls have it the other way round.

How to hold on to your evening without becoming someone else

Trying to last longer does not help a lark. What helps is to stop scheduling things that deserve a full head for after dark. A few rules that hold up:

• After eight, no decisions about money, career or relationships. Not because they are forbidden, but because you will reconsider them in the morning anyway.
• Push the difficult conversation to the morning. "I will come back to this tomorrow before nine" sounds professional and happens to be true.
• Learn to leave. Arrive among the first, talk to people properly for two hours, then go at half ten without an apologetic speech; the quality of your evening beats that of someone who stays until two and spends the last hour just sitting there.
• An evening routine without guilt. A lark has nothing to catch up on after dark. A quiet hour in which nothing gets decided and nothing gets produced is not wasted time, it is the condition for tomorrow morning being worth anything.

The other side of that coin is using the morning rather than sleepwalking through it. Most larks have their best two hours of the day and spend them scrolling the news and clearing small stuff, on the grounds that "you have to warm up before the big thing". The truth is the opposite: the warm-up already happened, and it gets thrown away. How to build the first ninety minutes in practice is described in the piece on the morning routine, and for a morning type it returns more than anything done after dinner.

Light can be used in both directions, because light is what tells the body clock what time it is. If you need to hold out a little later in the evening, for family or for shifts, keep brighter light on at home into the later hours and avoid stepping straight into the sun after waking. The effect is not miraculous and you will not move whole hours with it, but half an hour over a few weeks is realistic. It works the other way too: strong morning light keeps you anchored where you already are, which most larks take for granted until November arrives and the commute happens in the dark.

At work there is more room to negotiate than it looks. A meeting at half eight costs you precisely the window in which you are at your best, so it is worth moving it to eleven and blocking the morning for focused work. Selling that to colleagues is easy, because the owls will be glad of a later meeting as well.

If you are not sure whether you are a lark or a dove who simply starts work early, a short chronotype test will tell you in a few minutes, including how steady or flexible your rhythm is.

Adam made one change in the end. He moved his Thursday evening client calls to Thursday morning and announced at home that films in their house start at seven, not at nine. Within a month he stopped going to bed with the feeling that he had spent the whole evening pretending. Find one thing in your calendar this week that sits after eight for no good reason and move it to the morning; that is usually the entire difference between a lark whose rhythm works for them and a lark who fights it.