(The condition is much more common among teens, whose clocks gradually shift earlier as they age.) A few more adults (1 percent) have advanced sleep phase syndrome and prefer to go to sleep around 8 pm, according to the American Sleep Association. People like Sokolis are even more rare: Only around 0.2 percent - one out of 500 - of adults have a delayed sleep phase like Sokolis. There are only a handful of studies, each with a few hundred participants.) Most people - around 30 to 50 percent - fall right in the middle of the chronotype bell curve, sleeping between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am.Īnother 40 percent are either slightly morning people or slightly evening people, off by an hour or so. This all amounts to a case - not an absolute case, but a compelling one nonetheless - that we should listen to our bodies and not the alarm clocks. The mismatch between internal time and real-world time has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and depression. If you're just not a morning person, it's likely you'll never be, at least until the effects of aging kick in.Īnd what's more, if we try to live out of sync with these clocks, our health likely suffers. It turns out our internal clocks are influenced by genes and are incredibly difficult to change. Research has been gaining insight on that question. We all have a chronotype, just like we all have a height.Įven people who are slightly more oriented to the evening - people who would like to sleep between 1 am and 9 am, say - may be faced with a difficult choice: Listen to your body, or force it to match the sleep habits of most everyone else? And just like it’s rare for a person to be 7 feet tall, it’s rare for Sokolis to not be able to sleep until 3 am. Science has validated the idea that there are "morning people," "evening people," and those in between. We all have a preferred, inborn time for sleeping. Sokolis is on the far end of the bell curve of human sleep habits. "If it's between changing my career and finding a way to make it work, I'm definitely going to have to find a way to make it work," she says.
But now she's nearing graduation, and she's worried her unusual schedule will get in the way of her dream of becoming a teacher - a profession with notoriously early start times. While she's still a college student, Sokolis can start her day at 11 am, thanks to a flexible class schedule. It's just that her body prefers her to begin a seven- or eight-hour cycle after 3 am. It's not that she needs more sleep than the average person. When she was 19, Sokolis was diagnosed with delayed sleep phase, a disorder that sets her internal clock permanently out of sync with the rest of the world. But her doctors say it isn't just an excuse. Because it's my brain's fault, not mine."Ī college student would say that. "People have mocked me for it, saying how lazy I am, that I'm not trying hard enough. "It's really frustrating," Sokolis, a 21-year-old junior at Northern Arizona University, tells me. Even then, she still often sleeps through the clamor. If Cassidy Sokolis ever needs to wake up before 11 am, she scatters three alarm clocks throughout her bedroom.
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