Night Owls Face a Lifetime of Jet Lag

My dad used to tell me that it would be difficult for me to soar with the eagles by day if I was going to be up with owls at night. I certainly put that to the test and still do! But looks like he was right!

LiveScience reports on some Australian researchers who scanned the brains of both night owls and early birds and found night owls had lower “brain connectivity” (a measure of how “in sync” different brain regions are with each other) compared to early birds.

What does lower “brain connectivity” look like? In this study, the night owls showed poorer attention, slower reaction times and increased sleepiness throughout the hours of a typical workday. Sound familiar???  ZZzzzzzzzzzzzz  Ooops -- sorry, I dozed off there.

This could explain why night owls may have issues with attention and sleepiness when they try to conform to a typical 9-to-5 schedule, which doesn’t match their internal clock.

You early bird morning larks may experience the same feeling once in a while by way of jet lag, to which night owls say welcome to our daily 9-to-5 world!