Can a change of habits help you become more of a morning person?

Are you a morning person or a night owl? There are tons of self-help books out there that offer different advice on how to improve your sleep and how to become a morning person if you aren’t already. So what’s the consensus?

“Everybody’s ‘clock’ is set a little differently,” says Leisha Cuddihy, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester’s Comprehensive Sleep Center, to the New York Times. “You may never wake up totally ready to go and wanting to do stuff,” she adds. 

It’s easy to fall into a bad pattern where we go to bed late and have to get up early for work the next morning, often making it harder to wake up. So, a common mistake to adjust this is trying to go to bed earlier, only to end up tossing and turning because you aren’t sleepy. 

Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in sleep medicine at Stanford Medicine, says, “It’s biologically easier to force yourself to wake up than it is to force yourself to fall asleep.” So rather than trying to correct your sleep schedule all in one night, it’s better to do this in increments of 15 to 20 minutes every day, says Rosie Acosta, a meditation and mindfulness teacher at Headspace. 

It also turns out that whether you’re a morning person or not can be blamed on genetics. A recent paper published in Genome Biology and Evolution suggests that genes from our oldest relatives, the Neanderthal, dating back to the Middle Paleolithic age (250,000 to 30,000 years ago), could be responsible for how we sleep. 

While only 4% of the genome of present-day humans comes from Neanderthals, the researchers found that modern humans and Neanderthals had different genes that affected people’s circadian rhythm, or “body clock.” Essentially, it comes down to variations in light levels and how our bodies adapt to them. 

“When humans evolved in tropical Africa, the day lengths were on average 12 hours long. Now hunter gatherers spend only 30% of their awake time collecting food, so 12 hours is loads of time. But the further north you go, the shorter and shorter the days get in winter when food is particularly scarce, so it makes sense for Neanderthals and humans to start collecting food as soon as there is any light to work by,” said Mark Maslin, a professor of Geography at University College London, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Each day, our mood in the morning can depend on whether we turned in early, had bad dreams or stayed up late to watch one more episode of our favorite show. Our morning routine also influences our mood. For example, if one of the first things you do in the morning is look at notifications on your phone (where you might see emails from work, messages from friends and devastating world news), this contributes to the tone of your day and might make it harder to actually get into gear. 

Dr. Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a marketing professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says, “One of the reasons mornings can feel so stressful is because time is sort of taken from us, and we lose that sense of agency.” 

So, changing our morning routine to be more positive can help us become more of a morning person while also helping to improve mental health and life satisfaction and decrease the risk of diabetes and obesity. It may take a bit of trial and error but think about pleasant things you can do first thing in the morning, like reading a book, journaling, exercising or stretching, making a coffee or hot drink, eating a nice breakfast, getting some sun or just some quiet before the busy day ahead. “All of a sudden, it puts you in a different frame of mind,” says Dr. Holmes.