Prejudice abounds too: the productive, hard-working lark – the slow, lazy owl. What do you think? I mean, owls have their advantages too, don’t they?
Absolutely! After all, someone has to function in the evening and at night, be efficient, creative and emotionally balanced. At a time when many are already enjoying their evening off. However, I don’t think we should qualify the two chronotypes this way. One type isn’t more successful than the other. On the contrary, our clocks just run differently. And anyway, dare I say it: Let us owls let the larks have their worms!
You told me at the start of the conversation that you’re an owl. How do you deal with this in your own day-to-day life? Sleeping in probably isn’t an option with work, family and everyday life, is it?
I myself trick my internal clock with the help of light.
I’m sorry, what?
I try to influence my circadian rhythm using daylight lamps; I use these to coincide with the routine I need to adapt to. In other words, without a daylight lamp, I’d probably wake up between 8 and 9 o’clock in the morning. The lamps help me to get up at half past seven.
Amazing! How exactly does that work?
It’s simple. I regularly get up at anti-social hours, use the daylight lamps in the bathroom, with my first morning coffee, but also at work and at home. This means that I use daylight from the moment I get up until late afternoon. From the late afternoon until I get up in the morning, I stick to yellowish, warm light and activate the blue filter on electronic displays. That’s it.
This means that you can definitely adjust your internal clock.
But it requires discipline. Think of it this way: the “outer day” counts exactly 24 hours, but the “inner day” counts approximately 24 hours. In fact, the owl’s internal clock goes on for an average of about 12 minutes longer than the outer clock. If, for example, the owl, who spends the majority of the day indoors, does not consciously set their internal clock every day, their inner time can shift away from outer time. Blind people who do not sense light or those completely isolated from the outside world have their own rhythm take over. For example, after five days, they might be an hour later, and after 120 days, a whole day is missing. People in isolation experiments do not miss this day. Conversely, this means that with the help of the light trick, this natural delay can be stopped or even brought forward. But as I said, it requires discipline.
I talk to Stefan Telser for an hour, and while philosophising with him, I realise that sleep is about much more than that: «You shut your eyes, you open them, and something happens in between.» He continues: «If you start talking about it and go into depth, a whole cosmos of connections with our everyday life opens up.» Sleeping is a basic need. Just like eating, drinking, digesting, excreting. If we are denied these vegetative functions, we cannot function. We get into trouble. Sleep is fascinating. And precisely because sleep is so fundamental, so complex and fascinating, it should be given the attention it deserves. But you can’t sleep everywhere and all the time, says Telser. «Let’s imagine we had laid down to sleep under a tree 30,000 years ago. The chance of a wild animal eating us would have been huge. This means that our sleep-wake habits have always been subject to a certain amount of control. But as long as we can adapt, everything will be fine.»