Tag: wellness

Are Night Owls or Morning People Healthier? Neuroscience Reveals a Surprising Winner

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Daily writing prompt
Are you more of a night or morning person?
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Your body has a schedule, but are you listening?

You do not simply wake when you want to. You wake when your suprachiasmatic nucleus (a cluster of about 20,000 neurons in the hypothalamus) decides your internal clock has finished its nightly cycle (or just when your alarm goes off). You feel alert or sluggish depending on where you fall in a chronotype, a biologically influenced timing profile that shapes energy, mood, cognition, and metabolism.

We talk about morning people and night people as if they are personality traits, but neuroscience urges us to consider them as deep physiological patterns. The surprise is that neither chronotype is objectively “better.” The advantage depends on what modern life demands of you as well as how well your internal rhythms align with those demands.

Here is a more grounded look at what your body is actually doing.

I: What Chronotypes Really Are

Your circadian rhythm runs at about twenty-four hours depending on genetic architecture. The PER3, CLOCK, and BMAL1 genes help determine whether you drift earlier or later. About 40 percent of people lean morning, 30 percent lean evening, and the rest fall somewhere in the middle.

The timing affects more than just sleep. Research from the University of Birmingham and University of Surrey shows that chronotype predicts peak cognitive performance windows with real precision. Morning types perform best earlier in the day, with sharper working memory and mental stability. Evening types peak later, showing enhanced creativity and divergent thinking in the late afternoon and night.

Therefore, what you must consider is whether your schedule matches your internal timing.

II: The Neuroscience of Night Owls

Night owls tend to have delayed melatonin release, slower buildup of homeostatic sleep pressure, and greater resilience to sleep restriction in the late hours. They maintain higher activity in the reward circuitry during the evening, which has both benefits and risks.

Advantages

  • Peak creativity in non-standard hours. Several studies (including a 2020 paper in Personality and Individual Differences) show that evening types outperform morning types on divergent thinking tasks when tested in the late hours.
  • Flexible attention patterns. EEG recordings show that evening types maintain frontal-parietal connectivity later at night, supporting sustained attention into irregular hours.
  • Greater innovation under low structure. Environments that reward autonomy often see night-leaning individuals excel.

Drawbacks

  • Social jet lag. If society demands morning schedules, night owls experience chronic circadian misalignment, correlating with higher cortisol levels, impaired glucose regulation, and increased depressive symptoms.
  • Cognitive penalties early in the day. Working memory and decision-making dip sharply in morning hours for night types. (I can relate.)

So night owl advantages only fully show up when life allows a shifted schedule. Without that, the biological rhythm becomes a liability.

III: The Neuroscience of Morning Types

Morning people have earlier circadian anchors, in melatonin rising earlier, core body temperature peaking earlier, and cortisol following a strong morning surge that supports task initiation.

Advantages backed by research

  • Better synchronization with societal structure. Most schools and jobs begin early. Morning types rarely experience circadian misalignment.
  • Improved long-term health outcomes. Studies in Sleep Medicine Reviews link early chronotypes with lower obesity rates, more stable glucose metabolism, and reduced cardiovascular risk.
  • More consistent mood regulation. Morning types show stronger connectivity in the frontal control networks early in the day, which buffers emotional volatility.

Costs to consider

  • Lower creativity in late-day conditions. Evening testing often reveals reduced flexibility and weaker associative thinking.
  • Greater fatigue in late hours. Cognitive performance drops sharply past evening for early chronotypes.
  • Rigid energy curves. Morning types sometimes struggle with unpredictable schedule demands, late shifts, or creative tasks that require extended ideation windows.

Morningness thrives in structured worlds. It can falter in environments requiring spontaneity or irregularity in patterns.

IV: So Who Is “Better” Off?

Here is the actual scientific answer:
You do better when the world matches your chronotype.

The most consistent finding across chronobiology is the cost of forcing an internal rhythm to fit an external schedule. Researchers call this circadian misalignment, and it functions like internal jet lag every day. It impairs memory formation, increases inflammation, disrupts metabolic hormones, affects cardiovascular function, and even shifts risk-taking tendencies.

Night owls suffer more because modern society is built around morning expectations, but they thrive in environments where people can choose their hours.

A 2021 University of Melbourne study found that when allowed to select their own sleep–wake windows, evening types perform as well as or better than morning types on executive function tasks.

The question is not “Which type is better?”
The question is “Does your environment punish your biology or support it?”

V: The Nuanced Middle

Most people are intermediate types. The research calls this “neither type” or “mixed chronotype.” They tend to have flexible rhythms and benefit most from stable routines rather than extreme schedules.

The nuance is this:
The best schedule is the one that creates alignment between circadian biology and daily demand.
For some, that is a dawn-focused rhythm. For others, it is a late-evening flow state. For many, it is a middle ground with slight adjustments.

Conclusion: Consider yourself in rhythms

The rhythm in your brain is older than culture, older than electricity, older than cities. It evolved under open skies long before clocks existed. So follow your rhythm.

This does not mean abandoning discipline. It means using discipline to protect the hours that work for you. If your peak focus arrives at 10 p.m., build your creative world around that window. If your clarity comes with first light, guard that time like a resource. Chronotype does not decide what you can achieve. It only decides when your work can feel less like a fight.

Productivity culture loves to shame the tired and praise the early. Neuroscience suggests something gentler: you are not lazy, disorganized, or poorly optimized. You are rhythmic. And when you move with your rhythm instead of against it, getting started on your to-do list becomes less about squeezing output from a fatigued mind and more about allowing your best self to arrive on schedule.

If You Could Skip Sleep: What the Latest Brain Science Says You’re Really Losing

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Daily writing prompt
If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?
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A neuroscience and philosophy guide to the hidden work your brain performs at night and what happens to identity when those hours disappear.

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that you no longer need sleep. Without drowsiness, dream cycles, hours lost to the dark… At first this feels like freedom, like more time to learn. More time to create. Like more life packed into the same number of days.
But current neuroscience suggests a stranger truth. The most important parts of your identity happen while you are unconscious. Rewrite the night, and you rewrite yourself.

Your Brain Uses Sleep to Rewrite You

Modern sleep science shows that the brain works through the night to revise your experiences.

• Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR) research from 2024 demonstrates that memories cued during slow wave sleep become more stable and less emotionally reactive. Scientists played sounds tied to negative autobiographical events while participants slept and found that the next day, those memories carried lower stress signatures.

• A 2025 REM sleep study found that reactivating negative memories with an odor increased neural processing of the memory the next morning. The increase was not emotional intensification. Instead, it reflected deeper integration of the event with existing memory networks.

• New findings on adult born hippocampal neurons show that only a small population of cells replays waking experiences during REM. When researchers disrupted the timing of these neurons in mice, memory recall collapsed. The lesson is simple. Quality of memory depends on precise replay, not raw wakeful time.

If you lost sleep, you would gain hours, but lose the nightly work your brain performs to organize your life into meaning.

Extra Time Without Sleep Is Not Extra Life

People often imagine sleeplessness as a path to greater productivity. Yet sleep loss does more than create fatigue; it also changes the way the brain forms judgements and regulates emotion.

Consider two areas:
• Emotional regulation: Research from trauma therapy combined with TMR shows that sleep strengthens the results of therapeutic sessions. Patients who had sound cues replayed during sleep after EMDR showed reduced symptoms and increased slow oscillations that support emotional healing. Without sleep, emotional updates become inconsistent.
• Identity formation: Philosophers describe the self as a narrative process. Neuroscience now supports this. Sleep is when the brain binds semantic, emotional, and autobiographical memory into a coherent structure. If you removed that editing phase, you would not simply feel tired. You would feel scattered.

If you suddenly gained seven more waking hours, you would lose the nightly sense-making that keeps your personality coherent.

What Would You Do With That Time

If you did not need sleep, you would probably begin by doing what you already enjoy. Studying. Creating. Thinking. Reading. But without the biological systems that maintain attention, regulate mood, and integrate memory, the quality of those extra hours would change.

Work would become impulsive, as learning would become shallow, and emotional life would lose its gradients. You could accumulate more experiences, but you would have fewer tools to understand them.

Neuroscience suggests that sleepless productivity is an illusion, because, like it or not, sleep is what gives your wakeful hours their clarity.

Conclusion

If I had the ability to live without sleep, I would fill the extra time with projects that matter. Yet the newest research makes something clear. The cost of sleepless life is the erosion of memory precision, emotional stability, and personal identity.

Without sleep, you could do more, but you would undoubtedly understand less.
You would live longer in hours, but shorter in meaning.

Santa Claus of the Sea: Rethinking Aging Through Surf Therapy

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One morning during a quiet surf session, one man stood out from the rest. He had a long, white, Gandalf-esque beard that dripped with seawater. Despite being more than 65 years old, he took waves with a grace that could only be mastered with years of his craft. And from that moment on, he was known to me as the legendary Santa Claus of the Sea.

He was graceful. But this image stands in stark contrast to the current dominant narrative of aging.

The Reality of Aging: Physical and Psychological Ailments

Many health professionals are familiar with the list of common aging-related challenges, including:

  • Sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss)
  • Impaired balance and proprioception
  • Increased risk of falls and fractures
  • Joint degeneration
  • Reduced cardiovascular endurance

Alongside these physiological changes, we see a rise in mental health challenges:

  • Social isolation
  • Depression
  • Loss of autonomy and identity
  • Cognitive decline

These factors compound each other. For example, a loss of balance leads to a fall, which results in injury, which leads to hospitalization, immobility, and sometimes institutionalization, which all accelerate decline.

Modern rehabilitation techniques try to interrupt this cycle, but traditional therapy methods, particularly in geriatric care, often rely on repetitive, low-engagement exercises: resistance bands, parallel bars, leg lifts in clinics. These are essential in many cases, but they’re not enough. My grandma was prescribed chair exercises, but I want her to be able to strengthen herself in practical ways.

Adherence is a chronic challenge. Motivation wanes. And much too often, patients disengage.

So what if we reframed therapy? What if we made it joyful?

Surf and Ocean Therapy: Reconnecting Mind, Body, and Environment

Surf therapy is a movement-based, nature-integrated intervention that merges physical rehabilitation with emotional renewal.

It may sound radical, even niche, but it can gain traction for good reason.

Surfing involves:

  • Dynamic balance — reacting to ever-changing surfaces
  • Core and limb strength — paddling, popping up, stabilizing
  • Coordination and reaction time — reading waves, adjusting positions
  • Cardiovascular exertion
  • Mental presence — engaging with unpredictability in real time

All of this takes place in a natural environment that stimulates the senses and evokes meaning: the ocean. The ocean is something that soothes the mind, the beach a bonding place for communities, and the water something that reminds people — especially older adults — that they are still capable and evolving.

Evidence Supporting Surf Therapy for Older Adults

Though still an emerging field, several pilot programs and studies are showing promising results — not only for youth and veterans, but also for older adults and people living with chronic conditions.

A few key findings:

  • Balance & Mobility: A 2019 study on ocean-based activities for older adults found significant improvements in static and dynamic balance over 12 weeks. Gains persisted at a 3-month follow-up.
  • Mood & Depression: Programs like Waves for Change and Ocean Therapy for Veterans report measurable decreases in depression and anxiety after just 4–6 weeks of sessions.
  • Social Connection: Group surf sessions foster community — essential for reducing isolation, a major risk factor for early mortality.
  • Self-Efficacy: Participants describe a new identity: not as “patients,” but as athletes, learners, or adventurers.

In this way, movement that is meaningful is more sustainable than movement that is merely prescribed.

“But Is It Safe?” — Managing Risks with Realism and Responsibility

“Isn’t surfing dangerous for older adults?”

Yes — and no.

All physical activity carries some level of risk. But so does inactivity.

In fact, sedentarism is one of the most dangerous behaviors for aging adults, associated with:

  • Heart disease and stroke
  • Type 2 diabetes
  • Depression
  • Cognitive decline
  • Frailty and loss of independence

Surf therapy programs reduce risk by including:

  • Soft-top boards and padded equipment
  • Shallow-water options and beach-based sessions
  • Certified adaptive surf instructors
  • Physical therapists on-site or in collaboration
  • Buoyancy aids and wetsuits
  • Environmental checks (tides, weather, currents)
  • Gradual progression, from tide pool to open ocean

Most participants start slowly: learning to float, sit on the board, or wade safely. Athleticism isn’t required. Just reconnecting with movement, shedding fear of it, and being open to growing from unfamiliar experiences.

Surf therapy doesn’t replace traditional rehab. It complements it by giving people a reason to get stronger. And even if it’s not surfing specifically, being outside and in the elements is the reward in it of itself.

Beyond the Clinic: Reimagining Geriatric Therapy

The big idea is this:

Therapy doesn’t have to feel like therapy.

It can feel like joy. Like renewal. Like living again.

Healthy movement shouldn’t be limited to lifelong athletes. The myth that older adults are fragile, disinterested, or unwilling is just that — a myth.

The Santa Claus of the Sea isn’t just a surfer. He’s a living contradiction to our ageist expectations.

So understanding that movement if life at any age, we must devise better plans for maintaining movement in seniors. And we can start by inviting more of our elders into the water.

Parallel Resources

Procrastination for Dummies, by a Dummy

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Daily writing prompt
Which topics would you like to be more informed about?
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Do you find yourself unable to focus on things that matter?
Tasks that you know, without a doubt, will benefit your life. Things you’ve promised yourself you’d do, goals that could reshape your future… Yet, somehow, you don’t do them.

I do.

And I’ve tried to understand why.
I’ve dipped into the science of focus, from the neurological mechanisms that help us stay on task to the conditions needed for deep, uninterrupted work. But the deeper I dig, the more confused I become. The research contains contradictions, and what the media says about focus rarely aligns with what actual cognitive scientists are discovering.

And with the rise of self-improvement culture, a mythology has formed around the idea of discipline. We’re told that successful people are just more focused, more motivated, more driven. And if we’re not like them, the implication is that we’re simply not trying hard enough.

But that’s as far from the truth as you can get.

I’m not an expert (though I’d like to become one), but here’s the clearest conclusion I’ve come to:
The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of systems.
It’s not that you’re unwilling to do the work that needs to be done. It’s just that your environment, your habits, and the mental scaffolding you’ve built around your day-to-day life aren’t optimized to support focus.

Everything in nature requires activation energy (hi, chemistry class)—a certain threshold that must be met before a reaction can occur. The same applies to our behavior. Starting something hard, like studying, exercising, or writing, takes far more energy than continuing once you’ve begun. That beginning stage is the hardest part. And modern life is constantly raising the cost of starting.

Unfortunately, every time we reach for our phones, scroll social media, or binge a few episodes of something “harmless,” we’re not just wasting time, we’re retraining our brains (and I, more than anyone, wish this wasn’t true). We’re conditioning it to seek high-reward, low-effort stimulation. And the more we feed it, the more it resists anything else.

And that’s what’s scary. We think that these things are just distractions, but those early hits of false stimuli are actually inoculations that blunt our ability to focus later. They raise our brain’s threshold for engagement. So when we finally try to sit down and do the important stuff (stuff that takes time, patience, and effort) our mind rejects it. Not because we’re lazy, not because we’re unmotivated, but because we’ve already taught our brain what to crave.

Small actions have big outcomes. That innocent scroll in the morning may seem like nothing, but it creates ripples throughout your entire day. By the afternoon, your ability to focus has been quietly, but significantly, eroded. And no amount of “trying harder” can change that, because by then, the system is already working against you.