I’m a night owl. My daughter is not.
We were walking on a beautiful fall night recently when she told me how much she likes getting up early.
Some of her friends stay up late, but she prefers going to bed early and having time in the morning.
So, I’ve been trying but failing to adjust myself to get onto her schedule. At this point that mostly means going to bed at 1 a.m. and getting up before 7 to take her to school.
That math doesn’t work, and there have been more than a few days when I’ve run out of gas and had to take a nap in the afternoon.
With this in mind, I talked recently with Tapio Räihä, a physician who specializes in occupational healthcare at the University of Oulu in Finland. His latest research concerns what happens to night owls during their working lives.
Writing in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, Räihä and his coauthors followed 5,679 people from age 46 to 57, between 2012 and 2023. They tracked who received a disability pension for the first time.
The “relative hazard of receiving a new disability pension” was about 70 percent higher among evening types compared to morning types.
Among night owls, 8.3 percent of men and 12.1 percent of women received a disability pension during the follow-up. Among morning people, the figures were 5 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively.
The study doesn’t prove that being a night owl causes disability. And, I’m interpreting “likelihood of applying for disability” with likelihood of having some medical problem eventually—or at least of not liking your career enough that you apply for disability if you can.
Räihä pointed to the difficulty of keeping a schedule that conflicts with when you naturally want to sleep and wake up.
About 70 percent of the working night owls in the study had day jobs.
“Evening chronotypes are prone to get these health issues. And a big reason behind that is that their internal rhythm doesn’t match the society’s schedules,” he said.
As for my attempt to become a morning person, Räihä suggested there are limits.
“There are morning chronotypes, intermediate types and evening types,” he said. “And much of it is genetic, like 50% comes from your genes. So an evening person cannot change into a morning person. But there is some flexibility there because the other 50% is not dictated by genes.”
But then again: I want to spend time with my daughter in the morning. And school starts when it starts, with no concerns at all for my chronotype (to say nothing of the many other kids who are also not exactly early birds).
Anyway, maybe I’ll start gradually, catching myself when the clock strikes midnight and I’m still sitting on the couch with my laptop working on the Next Big Thing, whatever it seems to be at that time of the evening.
Here’s to “the other 50%.” that suggests maybe there’s hope.
Other things worth knowing …
NYT: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal: Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.
Reuters: The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission warned on Wednesday that U.S. broadcast networks could violate their regulatory obligations by airing “entirely fake polls and suppression polls.” FCC Chair Brendan Carr has faced pressure from President Donald Trump to crack down on US broadcasters and journalists. He did not name any specific polls in his statement that he believed were fake.
The Washington Post: “Their police jobs ended. They kept using Flock’s vast surveillance network.” A recent case marked one of at least 11 times in which unauthorized users have gained access to Flock databases and searched them without permission, sometimes to track the locations of romantic partners, a Washington Post investigation has found.
AP: A bow once used to fire arrows in an ancient hunt. A crunched tube of mayonnaise and a discarded wine bottle. An alpinist’s cracked helmet. A statuette dating back to Roman times. The Glacier Garden in Lucerne is showcasing artifacts like these in a new exhibit of relics that have emerged from Switzerland’s vaunted glaciers over the years, with more expected to come as global warming accelerates the thaw. The exhibit, whose title translates as “Treasury of Ice” from German, comes as Swiss glaciologists recently reported that Switzerland lost 5.5% of its total glacier volume this year.
Yahoo News: Researchers have discovered a protein that protects the brain’s immune cells from age-related decline, potentially leading to future treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. While growing older is the biggest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s, scientists still do not fully understand the biological processes that make the ageing brain increasingly vulnerable to such neurological conditions.
Yahoo News: A Las Vegas court convicted an Ontario man of animal cruelty charges Monday for snatching a flamingo named Peachy from its habitat at an iconic Las Vegas hotel in what prosecutors called a drunken and malicious act. Mitchell Fairbarn told the court that on the day of the incident, he drank “30 to 40” beers over the course of 24 hours while he was in Las Vegas for a construction expo. His attorney had told jurors Fairbarn regrets his actions while intoxicated and never meant to harm the bird, a key element in the felony charge.
Business Insider: Cisco’s president said he used personal AI agents to screen $9,000 worth of his yearly subscriptions.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Sung Jin Cho on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!