I'm not a morning person. Is that bad for business?

I’m not a morning person.

Note: This was written in January 2020, and since then I have grown to enjoy mornings, which I credit to my cat and Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

Unless forced to by an early flight or a car alarm, I rarely rise before 8 a.m. In the mornings I am groggy, impatient and completely useless.

Growing up, mornings were probably the largest source of conflict between my mom and I. It was always the same: She’d wake me up gently, I’d open one eye, she’d leave the room, I’d fall back asleep. You can imagine what happens next.

This video by Desi Banks captures it perfectly.

Let me be clear: It’s not that I don’t want to get up early. I’d love to be the kind of person that rises naturally at 5:30 a.m., exercising and meditating before the rest of the world is awake. Every now and then I do have a good week. But most of the time, I’m a snoozer.

“So what?” You may be wondering. “Loads of people like to sleep in. What’s the big deal?”

Here’s the big deal: I’m an entrepreneur. I work for myself. This means I spend a great deal of time in the productivity and self-development corner of the Internet, most of which is hyper focused on creating an indestructible early morning routine. It also means that most days I don’t have anywhere to be.

I have a good life. My work is fulfilling and does actually help people. I’m surrounded by wonderful friends. When I think about how I want to define success, I’m struck by how successful I already feel.

At the same time, I’m a proud Transformational Consumer—it’s in my nature to want to be and do better. So while my job as a freelance launch strategist affords me the luxury to start and end my work day whenever I want, the self-improvement side of my brain wants to know if there’s something I’m missing.

Everywhere I look for advice, the message is abundantly clear: The early bird gets the worm. That’s why recently I can’t stop wondering…

Is not being a “morning person” bad for business?

Let’s get clear on some terminology. A morning person, sometimes referred to as a “lark,” is early. They wake up early and go to bed early. By contrast, the “night owls,” are late. They stay up late and sleep in late, too.

Already there is space to consider the connotations of these words. What do you think of when you hear “early,” versus when you hear the word “late”? Which sounds more productive? If you were deciding between two candidates, one “early” and one “late,” which would you be more likely to hire?

The way we sleep is a behavioral tendency called a chronotype, a manifestation of what’s known as our body’s circadian rhythm. Sleep, a biological need, falls under the umbrella of chronobiology, the study of human rhythms and cycles.

As you can imagine, sleep is a pretty important cycle. Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, described sleep deprivation to Business Insider and it doesn’t exactly sound pleasant.

“Once you get past 16 hours of being awake, that’s when we start to see mental deterioration and physiological deterioration in the body. We know that after you’ve been awake for 19 or 20 hours, your mental capacity is so impaired that you would be as deficient as someone who was legally drunk behind the wheel of a car.”

Okay, so not sleeping enough isn’t the answer—I could’ve guessed that. But the question remains: Is there any real reason to want to get up earlier?

On one hand, yes. One study from the University of Texas found that students considered morning people had an average GPA of 3.5, compared to night owls’ 2.5. There’s also the societal benefit—most jobs and traditional school schedules are designed to take up daytime hours.

At the same time, creative types that find themselves productive in the evenings might be on to something, too. In a Vice article, professor Brant Hasler tells Dana Leventhal that as the prefrontal cortex—the part of our brain that helps us concentrate—gets ready for bed, we may experience less “cognitive inhibition.”

“The brain might be freed up for more divergent thinking, allowing one to make new associations between different concepts more easily.”

This freedom from the day’s concentration is often exactly the catalyst we need to finally get to that blog we wanted to write or painting we wanted to start.

So what is the truth?

Unfortunately, science is on both sides of the argument here. Although most of us fall somewhere in the middle (my midnight-8 a.m. sleep schedule is a good example), some people do simply have a circadian rhythm that lends itself to waking up notably early or staying up notably late.

The primary benefit of being an early riser, then, is societal. When you work a 9–5 job or have kids who need to be at school by 7, waking up at 5:30 in the morning really might be the secret to accomplishing your personal goals.

For someone like me, though—a creative entrepreneur with no real reason to get up at the crack of dawn—it’s probably more helpful to just honor my body’s actual rhythm and structure my day accordingly.

Whichever way you lean, the trick is to be intentional. Both larks and night owls often report that the quiet and solitude of those hours—whether before dawn or after dark—is what brings peace and allows for greater creative flexibility.

If you’re going to be a morning person, create a small ritual to accompany your early hours. If you’re going to stay up late, set a few rules to keep your mind in a flow-esque state.

One thing that’s true for everyone, no matter what time you wake up?

We could all stand to spend less time on our phones.