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Larks and Owls

© Stephen Weistling

Are you the type of person who wakes up in the morning ready to tackle the world? You spring out of bed, turn up the radio, fling open the window shades, get dressed, and hurriedly report to the kitchen for that first meal of the day. Before your second cup of coffee, you’ve planned your day, and before the first hour is used up, you’ve loaded and started the washing machine, made your grocery list, called a friend on the phone, and baked a cake. Well, maybe not all of that, but sometimes I think my wife is capable of that before 9:00 a.m.

Conversely, I’m an owl. Don’t get near me in the morning. Grumpy is a nice word for me at that time of day. Owls take forever to wake up and be functional. I stumble out of bed, turn off that blasted radio, try to wake up in the shower, and get dressed. If I’m doing really well, I even get my shoes on the right feet. Breakfast? I’m lucky to find the kitchen. OK, maybe I’m not that bad either. But when I had an office and employees, everyone knew to stay away from me until mid-morning. Don’t ask for anything, because the answer is NO. And at night? I’ll get my best work done after 10:00 p.m., about the time that my wife, (the lark) has been asleep already for an hour.

So what does this all have to do with shiftwork? Researchers have been able to design questionnaires to determine if a person is a lark or an owl. Then based on that, they measure each subject’s ability to adjust to different sleep-wake cycles, their mental functioning, whether they are introverted or extroverted, and levels of physical fitness. They found scores on vocabulary, reading, working memory, and “openness” or extroversion to be a little higher with owls.

Researchers have also found some support that larks are a little worse off than owls when it comes to shiftwork and the speed of adjustment to different schedules. In a past article we discussed the preferred method to transition between shifts if you're on a rotating cycle. Because owls can more easily extend their waking time, they can work rotating shifts (in a forward direction) more easily.

If you know that you are an owl, (trust me, you'll know), you may have a slight edge in adjusting to shiftwork. If you’re a lark, you may have a little more difficulty. Why is this important to know? If you already know that part of your problem is that you're a lark, then you will have to work even harder to employ those strategies that we’ve been talking about over the past few months. Or maybe you now know what the source of your problem is, that it won’t get better, and you may resign yourself to finding a good day job. Hey, it happens, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

from Kids Domain.com

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