Mental Health: When Night Owls Try to be Early Birds

I am a night owl, I have always been a night owl. Even when I was a baby Mum had to leave me in my cot in the dark till I fell asleep because if she picked me up I’d just look at everything and stay awake. I remember, as a child, I would obediently go to bed at my bedtime but would lie awake for what seemed like ages. I inadvertently discovered the truth about the tooth fairy because Mum thought I must have fallen asleep, but I was still awake.

I’ve always relied on something to wake me up, either a family member or an alarm. I’ve never been in full possession of my mental faculties for the first hour or so of my wakefulness. In school I was always in trouble for leaving this, that or the other at home because I’d forgotten to get it in the morning. I cannot make decisions in the morning, I tend to always have the same thing for breakfast if I’m in a hurry.

But worse than being a night owl, is being a night owl in a family of morning people. The people in my family spring out of bed, and complain that they can’t sleep in if they want to. I can sleep in till noon if I put my mind to it. Or don’t, as the case may be. By the time I’ve managed to put my sleepy feet on the floor the rest of my family seem to have completed a multitude of tasks. From walking the dog, to doing loads of washing, emptying the dishwasher, preparing lunches, having a leisurely cup of tea and reading a chapter or two of a book. The morning holds so much productivity for them, but for me only sleep.

I think the worst thing about being a night owl for me was family holidays, where I would trudge out to breakfast in my pyjamas, only to find a table of extended family already dressed for the day ready to ask me a plethora of questions and tease me about my sleepiness and attire.

“Hey there, sleepy head!”

“You missed out on seeing a magical unicorn skipping through the fields, just because you slept in.”

“Smile, the day is new.”

“Your pyjamas are ridiculous for some reason.”

And when I took to wearing a robe to cover my ridiculous pyjamas, “Good morning, Hugh Hefner!”

I can’t really remember what the comments were but this is how they sounded to me. They may have been misplaced attempts to make me laugh because no one told them night owls don’t laugh before 10am. In my sleep-addled state all I could do was grunt in reply and feel hopelessly inadequate. It even lead to me sleeping in more and more on these breaks because I couldn’t bear the thought of facing them. There came a point where by the time I got up the breakfast table was empty, only bruised fruit was left and I’d eat my cold toast in silence.

I’ve had it explained to me that my father and maternal grandmother are not morning people, but that doesn’t explain how they forged a working routine in which they got out of bed in the dark and left the house well before 7am to beat the morning traffic. This lead me to believe that maybe there was hope for me, maybe at some point in my life I’d get a job and forge my own morning routine and finally become a morning person.

But when I got a job in a maternity leave position where I had to leave the house by about 7am this didn’t happen. At this point I must explain, that in order to shower, have breakfast and get myself to an appearance level of ‘professional’ I’d need to get out of bed at 5:30am, 6am on days I didn’t wash my hair. And if you’re wondering what on earth I was doing in that time you should know that everything takes longer when your brain does not function.

During that year I managed to forget to put on deodorant one day, I wore several outfits that looked like I picked clothes out at random, I often ate breakfast or cleaned my teeth in the car and, most distressingly, felt myself falling asleep while driving to work. Had public transport been an option, I would have taken it. I religiously went to bed at 9:30pm, sometimes earlier. I made myself stick to the same times on weekends. But, despite the promises that following a routine would adjust my body clock, I never got used to it. Frequently, especially when I had to get up in the dark, which thanks to daylight savings was all but three months of the year, I would hear my alarm go off my first thought would be, “I wish I were dead.”

I don’t think that’s supposed to be anyone’s first thought in the morning. There were parts of my life and my job that I really engaged with, I didn’t feel like that all the time. But I was so relieved when the contract was up and I could return to a sleep pattern that didn’t involve me being utterly miserable. But that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty that I hadn’t been able to make the transition. It didn’t stop me from feeling like a terrible human being every time I slept past 8 am.

There seems to be a general understanding that morning people are just better than night owls. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. The early bird gets the worm. And so on and so forth.

I read articles all the time about how people who stay up late are more likely to be overweight and depressed. Most of these studies suggest that you go to bed earlier to combat this. That’s great, I can lie in bed in the dark for an hour or two hours instead of just half an hour, awake, staring at the roof, crying because of the fact that, biologically, I feel awake at night and find it nigh impossible to get out of bed before 7am and, apparently, it’s making me sad and fat. Which is probably just going to make me sad and fat.

People always feel the need to tell me stuff like, ‘you get your good sleep between 10pm and 12pm, if you miss out on even a small period of that you’re going to die ten years sooner.’ When I hear stuff like that all I can think is that I was royally screwed by genetics or something. Seriously though, if it’s that bad, shouldn’t my kind have been evolved out of the gene pool or something?

I long, I yearn, to be a morning person. I’d really like to be the kind of person who springs out of bed and gets some exercise done before beginning the day. The kind of person who gets the pick of tables when breakfasting out. The kind of person who beats the morning rush. The kind of person who wakes up early on a cruise to watch out the window as we pull into harbour. But instead I’m the kind of person who gets told on how much I missed out on because I was sleeping; the kind of person who turns my alarm off, thinks to myself, ‘I’m getting up now,’ and immediately falls back to sleep.

I fantasise about getting a sleep study done, being diagnosed with some disorder and being cured and suddenly becoming the kind of person I always wanted to be: a bright eyed morning person. But I actually don’t think that’s how sleep disorders work. If I did have one I’d probably have to go to bed with my mouth taped closed or a sleep machine whirring next to me, which would not help with the getting to sleep thing. Besides, aside from waking up feeling tired, I don’t really have any other symptoms, and that can be explained simply by not getting to sleep until late the night before.

I’ve tried a lot of things to become a morning person. I’ve tried sticking to a bed time routine. Getting up and eating breakfast straight away. Not eating after 8pm. Keeping my room as dark as possible. Going to bed an hour early and reading in the dim lamp light (usually ends in me reading for two hours). Setting alarms on the other side of the room (I get up, turn them off, and then fall asleep somewhere else). The only mildly effective thing is making sure I sleep with the blinds open so daylight wakes me up, which means when I want to get up is affected by what time sunrise is.

And have you read the advice on what you should do to get to sleep? Your bedroom should be at a controlled temperature, it’s supposed to be perfectly pitch black, you’re not supposed to hear any noise. But to get up early you’re supposed have light in the morning. Because I can so afford to build myself a soundproof, lightproof, air conditioned sleep bunker with the technology for lights to come on when I need to wake up.

At what point did we decide that the moral fibre of a person was linked to their sleep patterns? What is inherently harder working and more self disciplined about a person whose body clock means they feel awake earlier in the morning? What is inherently lazy about someone who goes to bed later and so sleeps in? Because if I think about it, worrying at night that I’m still awake and this is somehow causing me to gain weight, get depressed and be stupider is actually making it worse rather than better. And perhaps one of the reasons night owls like me are feeling so depressed might actually be that we’re being told all these things.

So I’ve decided that it does no good wishing I was a morning person. I am a night owl and for my mental health I need to accept that. I need to think about the good things that come with being a night owl – I can stay up as late as I need to with no effort whatsoever. I can write two thousand words of an essay in one night and still be coherent enough to get a good grade with it (a trait that served me well during my studies). I can drive late at night without getting signs of fatigue (can’t do it in the morning but I have morning people in my family to drive then). I have so many creative ideas late at night, I have a notebook by my bed to scrawl them down and then I can iron them out the next day. I have never fallen asleep in the cinema (something that most members of my family cannot say). Being a night owl has forced me to be very organised the night before, and means I have learnt how to get ready for the day in a very short amount of time. And I am not at all afraid of the dark, when you’re awake in it for a long time you get used to it.

I’m still working on defeating the negative self talk when I sleep in though. Trying to remind myself that this idea that night people are somehow morally bankrupt and lazy is actually a lie I’ve learnt from outer sources. That I’m actually no less of a person for being in my pyjamas at 9am. I’m learning to stop lamenting on the time lost by sleeping in and to start focussing on the time I do have. I need to recognise that I am built differently; not deficiently.

Do you feel out of step with the world in some way? How do you cope when you feel like you’ve been dealt a disadvantage you can’t change?

Next Tuesday I’ll share my night owl tips for getting to sleep and coping in a world where it feels like the early birds get all the advantages.

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You can get more information about the NSW Mental Health Association’s Mental Health Month here.