How Your Chronotype Affects Your Quality of Sleep

Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsWhat Is a Chronotype?Chronotype CategoriesDiscovering Your ChronotypeWhy Do People Have Different Chronotypes?How Do Chronotypes Affect Sleep?

Table of ContentsView All

View All

Table of Contents

What Is a Chronotype?

Chronotype Categories

Discovering Your Chronotype

Why Do People Have Different Chronotypes?

How Do Chronotypes Affect Sleep?

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If you’ve ever referred to yourself as a “morning person” or a “night person,” you were referencing your chronotype. It is a natural individual difference that can have a big impact on how much and how well you sleep, especially if you have a job or other obligations that adhere to a schedule that doesn’t work with your chronotype.

This article will define what a chronotype is, detail the categories of chronotypes, and explain why chronotypes differ between people. It will then wrap up with a discussion of chronotypes’ impact on sleep.

Chronotypes are an individual’s natural predisposition tosleepand wake up at certain times of day. Chronotype also influences how alert or tired you feel at various times throughout the day and impacts when you’ll be most productive during your waking hours.

Chronotype is related to circadian rhythm.Circadian rhythmcoordinates your body’s physiological processes, including the sleep-wake cycle, into a24-hour sequence. Your chronotype, also known as a circadian preference or circadian typology, is your innate inclination to sleep or wake up based on your circadian rhythm.

Chronotype isn’t the same thing as sleep duration, which is the total number of hours you sleep a night, but chronotype may influence sleep duration. For example, someone who has to get up at 7:30 a.m. for work is likely to get more sleep if they’re a morning person than if they’re a night person.

Research has shown that chronotype changes throughout the lifecycle.Kindergarten children prefer to wake up early,while adolescents prefer waking up and going to sleep later in the day, a phenomenon that increases throughout theteen yearsand peaks around the age of 19. Chronotype then shifts back to a preference for waking up earlier throughout adulthood. Men generally have later chronotypes than women before the age of 40, but after age 40 have earlier chronotypes.

Researchers have divided chronotype into three categories:

Even though both sleep scholars and the general population tend to emphasize morningness and eveningness when describing sleep timing preferences, the reality is that chronotypes are distributed nearly evenly along a spectrum. As a result, most people fall somewhere between the extremes of morningness and eveningness.

Furthermore, a number of scholars have suggested there’s a fourth chronotype:

While Breus’ quiz is fun and easy to take, it’s important to know that there’s no evidence to suggest it has been validated or peer-reviewed, the gold standards for confirming that a questionnaire actually measures what it claims to.

Some scholars propose that the variations in chronotype between individuals is a product of human evolution. A 2017 investigationof a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania demonstrated that over 20 days, different individuals took turns sleeping while others were awake.

This asynchronous sleep-wake pattern was connected to variations in chronotype. Based on these findings, the researchers suggested that different chronotypes are a product of natural selection, ensuring certain people stayed awake to keep watch at various times throughout the night to protect the group against vulnerabilities to predators and other dangers during sleep.

Adequatesleepis essential for healthy functioning. Therefore, it’s valuable to know how our chronotype might impact our sleep. Chronotype can effect how individuals interact with their environment, especially when it comes to the social parameters of work and school hours or other scheduled activities. This can be especially problematic for people with an evening chronotype.

Later chronotypes have a tendency to get the least sleep,be chronically tired, and suffer fromdisturbances during sleep. They also experience the most social jetlag, or the shifts people make in their sleep schedule between the work week and the weekend due to a mismatch between their innate chronotype and the demands of their weekday schedule.

Meanwhile, those with morning chronotypes appear to adjust more quickly to shifts in the duration, timing, and quality of their sleep than evening chronotypes. On the other hand, morning chronotypes may have difficulty staying up late to participate in social activities.

While an individual’s chronotype is likely to vary throughout their lifetime, it can’t be changed to accommodate work or school schedules. As a result,adolescentsand others with an evening chronotype are at a particular disadvantage because their chronotype doesn’t align with the expectations of early school and work schedules. This is why experts have pushed for later school start times for middle and high school students.

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If you have a later chronotype and work at an office that adheres to an earlier schedule, it might be beneficial to speak to your boss about your particular needs. Morning chronotypes will thrive on a standard office-day work schedule, but evening chronotypes are likely to be more productive if they start and end their workday later.

In fact, one studyfound that evening chronotypes who worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore had the flexibility to get up and go to bed later in the day no longer experiencedissues with sleep. This indicates that if evening types were able to work on a schedule that lined up with their chronotype, their sleep quality and quantity would improve.

9 SourcesVerywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Randler C, Schredl M, Göritz AS.Chronotype, sleep behavior, and the big five personality factors.SAGE Open. 2017;7(3). doi:10.1177/2158244017728321Tempaku PF, Ramirez Arruda J, Mazzotti DR, et al.Characterization of bimodal chronotype and its association with sleep: A population-based study.Chronobiology International. 2017;34(4):504-510. doi:10.1080/07420528.2017.1306707Fischer D, Lombardi DA, Marucci-Wellman H, Roenneberg T.Chronotypes in the US - Influence of age and sex.PLoS One. 2017;12(6):e0178782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0178782Randler C, Truc Y.Adaptation of the composite scale of morningness for parent report and results from kindergarten children.Swiss Journal of Psychology. 2014;73(1):35-39. doi:10.1024/1421-0185/a000121Breus M.Chronotypes.The Sleep Doctor.2022.Samson DR, Crittenden AN, Mabulla IA, Mabulla AZP, Nunn CL.Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers.Proc Biol Sci. 2017;284(1858):20170967. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0967Harfmann BD, Swalve N, Mitrzyk J, Montoye AHK.Effect of Chronotype on Sleep Quality in a Laboratory Setting.Int J Exerc Sci. 2020;13(3):1283-1294.Walker T.Later school start times more popular, but what are the drawbacks?National Education Association. 2022.Salfi F, D’Atri A, Amicucci G, et al.The fall of vulnerability to sleep disturbances in evening chronotypes when working from home and its implications for depression.Sci Rep. 2022;12(1):12249. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-16256-6

9 Sources

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Randler C, Schredl M, Göritz AS.Chronotype, sleep behavior, and the big five personality factors.SAGE Open. 2017;7(3). doi:10.1177/2158244017728321Tempaku PF, Ramirez Arruda J, Mazzotti DR, et al.Characterization of bimodal chronotype and its association with sleep: A population-based study.Chronobiology International. 2017;34(4):504-510. doi:10.1080/07420528.2017.1306707Fischer D, Lombardi DA, Marucci-Wellman H, Roenneberg T.Chronotypes in the US - Influence of age and sex.PLoS One. 2017;12(6):e0178782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0178782Randler C, Truc Y.Adaptation of the composite scale of morningness for parent report and results from kindergarten children.Swiss Journal of Psychology. 2014;73(1):35-39. doi:10.1024/1421-0185/a000121Breus M.Chronotypes.The Sleep Doctor.2022.Samson DR, Crittenden AN, Mabulla IA, Mabulla AZP, Nunn CL.Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers.Proc Biol Sci. 2017;284(1858):20170967. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0967Harfmann BD, Swalve N, Mitrzyk J, Montoye AHK.Effect of Chronotype on Sleep Quality in a Laboratory Setting.Int J Exerc Sci. 2020;13(3):1283-1294.Walker T.Later school start times more popular, but what are the drawbacks?National Education Association. 2022.Salfi F, D’Atri A, Amicucci G, et al.The fall of vulnerability to sleep disturbances in evening chronotypes when working from home and its implications for depression.Sci Rep. 2022;12(1):12249. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-16256-6

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Randler C, Schredl M, Göritz AS.Chronotype, sleep behavior, and the big five personality factors.SAGE Open. 2017;7(3). doi:10.1177/2158244017728321Tempaku PF, Ramirez Arruda J, Mazzotti DR, et al.Characterization of bimodal chronotype and its association with sleep: A population-based study.Chronobiology International. 2017;34(4):504-510. doi:10.1080/07420528.2017.1306707Fischer D, Lombardi DA, Marucci-Wellman H, Roenneberg T.Chronotypes in the US - Influence of age and sex.PLoS One. 2017;12(6):e0178782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0178782Randler C, Truc Y.Adaptation of the composite scale of morningness for parent report and results from kindergarten children.Swiss Journal of Psychology. 2014;73(1):35-39. doi:10.1024/1421-0185/a000121Breus M.Chronotypes.The Sleep Doctor.2022.Samson DR, Crittenden AN, Mabulla IA, Mabulla AZP, Nunn CL.Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers.Proc Biol Sci. 2017;284(1858):20170967. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0967Harfmann BD, Swalve N, Mitrzyk J, Montoye AHK.Effect of Chronotype on Sleep Quality in a Laboratory Setting.Int J Exerc Sci. 2020;13(3):1283-1294.Walker T.Later school start times more popular, but what are the drawbacks?National Education Association. 2022.Salfi F, D’Atri A, Amicucci G, et al.The fall of vulnerability to sleep disturbances in evening chronotypes when working from home and its implications for depression.Sci Rep. 2022;12(1):12249. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-16256-6

Randler C, Schredl M, Göritz AS.Chronotype, sleep behavior, and the big five personality factors.SAGE Open. 2017;7(3). doi:10.1177/2158244017728321

Tempaku PF, Ramirez Arruda J, Mazzotti DR, et al.Characterization of bimodal chronotype and its association with sleep: A population-based study.Chronobiology International. 2017;34(4):504-510. doi:10.1080/07420528.2017.1306707

Fischer D, Lombardi DA, Marucci-Wellman H, Roenneberg T.Chronotypes in the US - Influence of age and sex.PLoS One. 2017;12(6):e0178782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0178782

Randler C, Truc Y.Adaptation of the composite scale of morningness for parent report and results from kindergarten children.Swiss Journal of Psychology. 2014;73(1):35-39. doi:10.1024/1421-0185/a000121

Breus M.Chronotypes.The Sleep Doctor.2022.

Samson DR, Crittenden AN, Mabulla IA, Mabulla AZP, Nunn CL.Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers.Proc Biol Sci. 2017;284(1858):20170967. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0967

Harfmann BD, Swalve N, Mitrzyk J, Montoye AHK.Effect of Chronotype on Sleep Quality in a Laboratory Setting.Int J Exerc Sci. 2020;13(3):1283-1294.

Walker T.Later school start times more popular, but what are the drawbacks?National Education Association. 2022.

Salfi F, D’Atri A, Amicucci G, et al.The fall of vulnerability to sleep disturbances in evening chronotypes when working from home and its implications for depression.Sci Rep. 2022;12(1):12249. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-16256-6

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