Lions and Dolphins and Bears! Oh My!

If you want to see every conceivable sleep on display under one roof, take up residency for a few weeks at a large art colony. Three meals a day are often served buffet-style, typically in 90-minute open windows. Dashing in for the last five minutes to squirrel away a plate for later is just fine. Artists are given individual sleep and studio spaces where they can personalize their atmospheric cues (whether blazing lights or blackout curtains), and noise pollution is restricted (you’re asked to keep all music inside headphones). 

Unlike “adult resort” models that are wellness-centered, such as Kripalu or Canyon Ranch, there’s no imperative here to focus on your health. What people focus on, typically, is maximizing productivity on their passion projects. Come for the escape, or perhaps the professional prestige; stay because you’re painting five large canvasses or drafting 20 pages a day. I remember one writer who completely reversed her sleep schedule to finish her novel. When we showed up for dinner, she was showing up for breakfast. 

What we know about circadian rhythms is that Earth-bound organisms experience them on a 24-hour cycle that influences sleep patterns, hormones, appetite and digestion, and body temperature. Are these factors exactly concurrent to mental acuity and energy? No. Are they heavily related? Absolutely. In 1975, the term “chronotype”—the behavioral manifestation of one’s individual circadian rhythms, meaning your instincts of when to wake, when to rest, and when you’re operating at top speed—was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the human brain, the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) in the hypothalamus respond to light and dark, and this helps control our regulatory systems. Although we primarily register light and dark with our retinas, medical studies in 2021 and 2022 also revealed significant processing in other organs, specifically our skin and livers. So, your liver can tell time (and not just “whiskey o’clock,” an hour regularly experienced at the art colonies). If that strikes you as weird, well, your understanding of circadian rhythms is about to get weirder. 

ARE YOU A GOOD LARK OR A BAD OWL?

An influential 1977 Biological Psychology survey sorted us into morning larks, who favor earlier bed and waking times, and night owls. Assuming the larks have life advantages pre-dates scientific study (thanks, Benjamin Franklin) but contemporary research debunks the idea that only one chronotype can be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Nonetheless, as evidenced in a 2019 Nature Communications study, “morningness” is associated with better mental health—and, per a 2022 Journal of Sleep Research report, conventional social supports reinforce that outcome. 

In other words, it’s hard to make a great impression at work if you’re a night owl among early birds. Now, what if I expand the menagerie? What if I tell you that some sleep-centric organizations offer up four chronotypes: lions (pre-dawn risers who make up 15% of the population), bears (the 55% majority who rise with the sun), wolves (a.k.a., night owls, another 15%), and dolphins (the rare 10% who are chaotic sleepers)? You might first ask–what happened to the other 5%? I don’t know. Then you might ask: are they trying to sell me something?

Well, they probably wouldn’t mind if you followed their affiliate link to buy a mattress.

Circadian rhythms are real, but assigning chronotypes is just a helpful shortcut. Individual rhythms change with age (even larks, as teenagers, notoriously veer toward later bedtimes) and you can condition your rhythms. If self-identifying a chronotype names useful patterns, go for it. For example, as a wolf, I give myself permission to take care of inconsequential emails at 9AM (while the bears are eating frogs) and save my first cup of coffee until 10 AM. Just remember that, as with judging the “accuracy” of astrology, you’re vulnerable to confirmation bias. 

HIT YOUR PILLOW TWO TIMES

We’ve always needed people to be awake, at any given hour, to survive as a tribe. The world is full of nocturnal predators, and there’s never a time when you don’t need someone to tend the fire. People spend entire careers on the night shift. Once we set aside the presumption that a “workday” runs from 9 AM to 5 PM, we realize that history is full of sleep modalities that seem unconventional by modern standards. That’s why, when historian A. Roger Ekirch ran across a reference to “first sleep” in a 1697 legal document, he took a second look. 

Ekirch ended up compiling hundreds of examples of biphasic sleep patterns in his book, At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime (published in 2004 and reprinted in 2022), spanning from ancient Greece through the 19^th century. Biphasic sleep features a first wave of rest, nighttime activity, then a second wave. (Cultures that honor an afternoon “siesta” are also biphasic.) Some couples used first sleep to recover from the exhaustions of the day, then had sex; a 16^th-Century French doctor’s manual goes so far as to suggest it is the optimal time to conceive. 

As I was saying about productivity…when I’m at an art colony, I do my best work when I get into a biphasic sleep pattern. After dinner and conversation with the other residents, I have first sleep from 11 PM to 2 AM; wake and write until 5 AM; and sleep again until 9 AM. But if you have the means to try this for yourself, I have the same advice we gave last week for mornings—choose a routine and stick with it. Keep the cognitive lift attached to deciding “how am I going to spend this time?” minimal, to focus your resources on meaningful actions.  

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE BED

“Bedtime procrastination” simply means staying up past the bedtime suggested by your individual circadian rhythms. The relative inflexibility of your waking time (either based on real-world commitments, or your body clock) results in sleep deprivation, usually noticeable in the form of delayed mental and physical reflexes. As observed in a 2018 Frontiers in Psychology study, night owls are more prone to sleep procrastination, as part of a larger pattern of struggling with self-regulatory practices. But as problems go, it is a relatively banal one, unless it becomes chronic.

“Revenge bedtime procrastination”? That’s a phrase that gets one’s attention. This phenomenon rose to prominence in Western social media after being mentioned in a June 2020 tweet by Chinese-American journalist Daphne K. Lee. Lee was referencing a distinctly Chinese phenomenon (the term’s transliterated name is bàofùxìng áoyè) tied to an infamously widespread work schedule of 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week. Wasting time that should be used to recharge for the next workday becomes a form of passive protest. Self-punishing, yes, but also deeply satisfying. 

Systemic deficits in both the duration and the quality of our sleep are a bigger problem than this blog post can tackle, particularly in a reality informed by the Covid pandemic. But as I reflect on my personal relationship with revenge bedtime procrastination—where my sense of being endlessly overwhelmed was triggered not by working with Maestro Group, but by my years in academia—I wish I could reach out, with my newly acquired expertise in circadian rhythms, and shake my past self by the shoulders. Do you not understand the science?

Procrastinate, we all do that. Procrastinate about going to bed, weird, but okay. Procrastinate vengefully? You do you. Just do not procrastinate by staring at your phone’s screen. Put. The. Phone. Down. Screens emit blue light, the perception of which affects our melatonin production, and that hormone—which past Sandra took for granted because she could buy it inexpensively, in teeny-tiny doses—turns out to be astonishingly powerful at ensuring good sleep. Whether lark or owl, lion or dolphin, that’s one tasty treat that we can all agree on. 

Understanding the science of sales makes for sweeter dreams. Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, assessments, and more.