

Few students get through their academic careers without pulling some late nights. No matter how good your time-management skills, sometimes assignments pile up and deadlines converge, particularly towards the end of term.
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Attention problems tend to follow during the week, even with a full eight hours of sleep every single night. If you normally go to bed at 10.30pm, but on Friday and Saturday you stay out until 1.30am, it’s as if you have flown from your home in New York to Los Angeles for the weekend. Staying up much later on the weekend and sleeping in on Sunday – as many people do – leads to social jet lag. Even on weekends, daily routines should remain roughly the same.

A fixed-time learning session leads to better cognitive performance at that time of day, and if it the task is demanding enough, your study sessions can even reset your body clock.ĭecide on a bedtime and a time for waking up, then stick to it.

The brain can prepare for a bout of intensive focus if it’s required at the same time every day. Consequently, memory is closely linked to the internal clock, and when we learn things, there is an internal time stamp attached to those memories. One of the most powerful factors that influenced the evolution of human memory was the need to anticipate regular events – such as the appearance of food or predators – in the environment. Not only is extroversion linked to evening chronotypes, it also tends to exacerbate the evening-active lifestyle because that’s when much of our social activity goes on. This problem disproportionately affects men and extroverts, who are each more likely to be night owls. Research shows that morning-active students have higher academic achievement and feel more immersed and focused in their studies, whereas night owls struggle with fatigue in the classroom. Unfortunately, it also comes with real problems for students. In fact, researchers proposed that whereas the end of puberty is defined as the time when your bones stop growing, the end of adolescence is the abrupt biological shift away from late sleeping that occurs around the age of 20.īeing a night owl means hitting your cognitive peak later in the day. After this peak comes a shift back to morningness. In the late teens and early 20s, we are the latest sleepers – and latest wakers – that we will ever be. While young children are early birds, adolescents begin to shift into a later phase. A longer cycle leads to a later chronotype.Īge also plays a large role in a person’s chronotype. As much as you might force yourself into another schedule, your chronotype is largely genetic, and it’s affected by the length of your circadian cycle. Each of us has a chronotype, a tendency to get up early or stay up late, or perhaps flit somewhere in the middle. Being a morning lark or a night owl is not a choice – you’re born with it.
