HEALTH

The Four Types of Sleep

Schedules
A new study suggests that some people are neither "owls" nor "larks"

JD Hancock/Flickr/Atlantic
OLGA KHAZAN | NOV 11, 2014

Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel-prize-winning Austrian physicist, was able to

make major contributions to the fields of quantum mechanics, general relativity,
and color theory during his lifetime. There was only one caveat: He was not able
to make those contributions ... in the morning.
“He couldn’t work in the mornings at all,” his wife, AnneMarie, said in an
interview. “The [Max] Planck lectures—as you know, it was 30 or 40 years ago
that Planck was in Berlin—were given in the morning from nine to ten. When he
got this very, very honorable call to Berlin, he wrote first thing and said, ‘I’m very
sorry, but I can’t keep the lecture hours because I can’t work in the morning.’ ...
They understood, and changed it to the afternoon—two lectures, one after the
other—on two days.”

"I’m very sorry, but I can’t keep the

lecture hours because I can’t work in
the morning."

Ah, to be so famous that a major university rearranges its events just so you can
hit the snooze button.

Scientists would later classify people like Schrödinger as “owls”—people who

prefer to wake up late and are more alert in the evenings. It’s one of two basic
chronotypes, or preferred sleep schedules. The other is “larks,” or crazy people
those who prefer early mornings.

But now, scientists in Russia are proposing that there are actually four
chronotypes: In addition to early and late risers, they say, there are also people
who feel energetic in both the mornings and evenings, as well as people who feel
lethargic all day.

For a study forthcoming in the journal Personality and Individual Differences,

biologist Arcady Putilov and his colleagues at the Siberian Branch of the Russian
Academy of Sciences asked 130 people to stay awake for 24 hours. The subjects
filled out questionnaires about how awake they felt, their sleep patterns, and how
well they had functioned during the previous week.

The results showed that among them were 29 larks, who showed higher energy
levels at 9 a.m. than at 9 p.m., and 44 owls, for whom the opposite was true. The
owls also went to bed about two hours later, on average, than the larks. But the
rest of the group fell into neither of these patterns. As BPS Research Digest puts
it:

There was a “high energetic” group of 25 people who reported feeling

relatively sprightly in both the morning and evening; and a “lethargic”
group of 32 others, who described feeling relatively dozy in both the
morning and evening.

Both the lethargic and energetic participants went to bed and woke up
somewhere between the owl and lark times. The energetic people slept about a
half-hour less overall than the other three groups, netting about 7.5 hours of
sleep each night.

So next time, rather than complain to your co-workers that you’re “always tired,”
just let them know that you’re part of a newly discovered chronotype that is, in
essence, all out of awakes to give.

The next big question is, obviously, what bird names to assign these two new
groups. Lazy Bird and hummingbird? The albatross and the peregrine falcon?
How many of these are already taken by indie bands?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OLGA KHAZAN is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers health.

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