Listening To Your Body Clock Can Make You More Productive And Improve Your Well-Being
Chronobiology
research suggests nothing less than a complete overturning of the
notion that we should all be working from 9 to 5. Some people are
just not built for that.
From
an early age, we're taught that getting up early is good for us.
Sayings likeThe
early bird catches the worm and Early
to bed and early to rise makes and man healthy, wealthy and wise are
part of the culture and have a certain moralizing force. People who
go to bed early and get up early are upstanding and productive.
People who go to bed later and wake up later are degenerate and lazy.
Nowadays,
however, there's a growing body of thought to say this is not only
wrong, but also counterproductive. Research into our internal body
clocks—what's called chronobiology—shows that people have
naturally different sleep patterns and therefore work best at
different times of the day. So, while some of us are indeed most
productive in the morning, many of us only snap into our highest gear
later in the day.
Chronobiologists
have identified two polar-opposite sorts of people: type As who wake
up early in morning, even on weekends; and type Bs, who accumulate
"social jet lag" during the week—the difference between
their personal clock and the socially-directed one—that they need
to work off by sleeping longer at weekends. (The term "social
jet lag" was popularized by the German chronobiologist Till
Roenneberg in his book Internal
Time.
See a good review here;
a charming video made by Roenneberg's daughter is
.
The
implications of internal clock research are profound. For starters,
research suggests the standard 9 to 5 working day is antiquated,
reflecting an agrarian economy (where everyone needs to be up with
the lark) not a globalized knowledge one. Second, it implies that
making everyone start the day at the same time is fundamentally
unfair to people who aren't at their best in the morning. And
three—more positively—it says we might engineer a rise in
productivity if we organized things differently.
The
start-early norm may be most damaging to kids because the incidence
of B-types is highest in younger years (see chart). A recent
study by the
University of Kentucky,
comparing the performance of elementary students with different
school start times, found that early starters clearly did worse than
later starters. Similarly, studies byChristoph
Randler at
the University
of Heidelberg report
that students tend to do better in exams later in the day.
Schools
in Denmark, which have experimented with different start times, have
also seen positive results. For example, the Vorbasse
School introduced
flexible hours for 7th, 8th, and 9th graders. For certain classes,
students could choose between an 8-10 a.m. time slot and a 2-4 p.m.
one, according to their chronotype. After a year, grades rose from an
average of 6.1 to 6.7 (on a 12 point scale). Similarly, the
Ungdomshoejskole secondary school moved from a start-time of 8:30
a.m. to 10 a.m. Teachers had to develop extra lesson materials
because the students were so much more alert and willing to learn.
Camilla
Kring,
a Danish work-life consultant, argues that the benefits don't only
extend to students. Kring, who has a PhD in work-life issues,
interviewed parents of kids at Frederiksberg Ny Skole (New
School),
which offers a choice between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. or 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.
(The first group gets its most intensive teaching between 8 a.m. and
9 a.m., the second group between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.) Many said their
kids were easier to handle.
"It's
terrible for the parents to wake up a child every morning so they can
go to school at 8 o'clock. They have conflict with the child every
morning and it results in a lot of guilt," she says. "Just
by moving school by one hour, it results in less conflict because the
child can wake up by themselves at 8 and go to school by 9."
Kring
argues that staggering school times also takes pressure off transit
and makes for a safer commute (most kids in Denmark get to school by
bike, so road safety is a special concern).
More
broadly, Kring says we could improve well-being and raise economic
output if we listened more to circadian rhythms and adjusted working
hours as a result. "We could have a lot of productivity if we
could design working times for A persons and for B persons," she
says. "You have to make a more individual work and life design
and then have a social acceptance of different ways of working if you
want to unleash it in your company."
Kring
is working with companies like AbbVie, a big pharmaceutical
brand,
to identify chronotypes among its staff. She says it may make sense
to match people to different time-zones. So, for example, a European
company could use A types for Asian business (which happens earlier
in the day) and B types for American business (later in the day).
"There
is a lot of well-being and life quality in humans being in rhythm.
Instead what we do right now is to teach people not to listen to
their own body," she says.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3038029/how-listening-to-our-body-clocks-can-improve-productivity-and-raise-wellbeing?utm_source
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