


“One of the first things I’m asking them to do is to hydrate. “Society works around the bear’s schedule, so they’re getting up around 7:30,” says Breus. Bears should then drink a glass of water, before they reach for a cup of coffee. An omelette with avocado, for example, would be a good choice.įor bears, who Breus describes as fun-loving people with easy-going attitudes, it’s important to wake up without hitting the snooze button. It turns out that if they exercise later, it actually helps them extend their day and they can stay up a little later because, socially, that’s become a problem for lions.”įor dolphins - those late-night loving, problem sleepers - it’s important to eat a high-protein breakfast. So, one of the things that I’ve been teaching my lions, which most people don’t really think about, is I actually have them exercise in the afternoon or early evenings. “They get up around 5:30 and they’re ready to go. “Lions rarely have problems in the mornings ‘cause they’re my early risers,” explains Dr. They call this approach Morning by Design, and it takes into account things like lifestyle, diet and exercise habits. Taking sleep drive into account, Breus worked with the global grooming brand Braun to make recommendations for how people can better customize their morning routines, based on their sleep chronotype. It never took into account sleep drive.” He says sleep drive is predetermined by the PER3 gene and the buildup of a naturally-occurring chemical called adenosine in the body. “What was so fascinating,” explains Breus, “was that the previous conceptualization only looked at timing, your circadian rhythm.

That means, the vast majority of people - in this case, bears, who are most energetic in midday - were not accurately reflected in the old way of thinking. And somewhere between 10-15 percent of people are dolphins. It turns out that roughly 15 percent of people are lions (the category more commonly known as “early birds”). And I discovered that there were actually four different chronotypes: the early one, which I’m calling the lion the middle, which is a bear the late evening people, which are wolves and then there are the insomniacs, which are dolphins.” And when my methods for working with her weren’t working well, I dug into the literature to understand what was going on. And then I had a patient come in, who was a classic insomniac. “I used to think there were only early bird and night owl. “I used to think that there were only two chronotypes myself,” says sleep specialist and best-selling author Dr. Sleep hacking tips: 7 ways to maximize your Zzzzz's 7 photos In fact, buying into it may actually be hurting our health. However, one of the nation’s leading sleep experts suggests that this prevalent belief is not entirely accurate. That theory has been around for ages, and lots of us probably identify with one of those two categories. Studies on extreme cases-shift workers and people like ER doctors and firefighters who regularly stay up all night-suggest the downsides can be quite dire.Most people have traditionally believed that there are two sorts of sleepers: early birds and night owls. We’re all feeling the effects of this, to some extent, no matter when we like to go to sleep research indicates that modern humans are sleeping poorly thanks to artificial light, warmer temperatures, and stress, and scientists are working to understand what kind of impact this has on our health. Messing with your preferred sleep schedule can drastically disrupt your circadian rhythms, which in turn can have severe, negative effects on your health. “There are ideal or optimal times for certain things to occur,” says Knutson. Circadian rhythms determine sleep patterns, energy levels, hormones, and body temperature-basically all the most important things. The mismatch Knutson is referring to has to do with circadian rhythms, the biological processes that govern the body over the course of the 24-hour day. So it’s a mismatch between the internal clock and the external world, and it’s a problem in the long run.” We think the problem is that the night owls are forced to live in a more ‘lark’ world, where you have to get up early for work and start the day than their internal clocks want to. “We think,” says Knutson, “it is at least partly due to our biological clocks.
