Our night-owl culture is officially under attack. There's no denying it now. The evidence is solid. We can no longer pretend there isn't a problem. Reading, playing on the computer and drinking and smoking all night with friends does in fact have a negative impact on our academic performance. A new scientific finding illustrates unequivocally what we already knew or suspected intuitively: Night owls get lower grades.
Armed with the dull hypothesis, researchers at the University of North Texas split 824 students into two categories: the good (high GPAs) and the bad (low GPAs). In the survey, the good students mostly identified themselves as "morning people." The bad students griped about trouble staying focused and sleep irregularities such as difficulty falling asleep, sleepwalking, restless kicking . and most likely an inordinate fondness for potato chips and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Most of them fell asleep during the survey before they got that far, though.
That's not all. Last week, scientists elsewhere presented yet another attack on our sunlight-challenged, vampire-wannabe brethren.
At the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, politically correct and sensitive researchers presented their findings that "eveningness" was associated with the various sleep irregularities and disorders the bad students complained about in the academics performance study.
All this time, I thought it was a chicken/egg thing. My early morning urges to grab the shotgun when my ears are violated by the foul and discomforting notes of those insidious song birds is in fact a result of my staying up too late and not at all the inherently annoying reality of avian mate-selection itself or some sort of inborn sleep problem.
And still, that's not all. Two articles do not a coordinated attack make. There's more.
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Just when I thought all this demagoguery was merely a blip on my media radar, Deepa Ranganathan, writing for the online magazine Slate, had the gall to suggest we can fix this problem. Ranganathan provides a litany of bizarre quackery, which we can embrace in order to realize our hidden inner morning person. He ridiculously suggests things like getting up and walking in the morning, time-management, keeping the lighting to a minimum in the evening, forcing yourself to get up earlier and wearing yellow-tinted glasses in the evening. He even has the nerve to conclude that getting up in the morning has an "allure."
As if we don't get enough bad-mouthing and knowing glares when we show up late for everything, now the very core of our identity - that obstinate nocturnal artifact of our childhood you-can't-make-me-go-to-bed trauma - is under attack. We're no longer veiled with a social mystique by virtue of the hours we keep. It's undeniable: Something is wrong with us.
And not only is there something wrong with us, but we can supposedly do something about it. I feel like a social pariah now, like a smoker unwittingly lighting up in a bar on the Square. Now even the most chipper, latte-toting morning type can reasonably resent our deviant ways and cast judgment on us.
We night owls are now left with only one option. This is cultural diversity, and if it's cultural diversity, then it must be preserved. We will not be quietly assimilated by the hyper-productive Borg. We also have science on our side.
Researchers at Norwalk Hospital's Sleep Disorders Center recently found that high school students fared better when their school hours started later. They stopped falling asleep in their classes. Go figure!
That's not all. "Eveningness" may in fact be something more than an unwholesome lifestyle choice.
Several years ago, researchers at the University of Surrey isolated a gene associated with preferences for night and day. The gene is called Period 3. Never mind that they also concluded it's a lifestyle thing for most people, so long as we have the benefit of the doubt. Am I right? We can now blame our parents for passing us a bad circadian clock.
So there you have it. The world must accommodate the night owls. Let us sleep in, and we're just as functional as the morning people. And most importantly, it's not a lifestyle choice; it's not our fault, and it's not really wrong.
So if you can crawl out of bed before the rest of the world closes shop, call your senators, call your representatives and demand accommodations. In the meantime, it might not hurt to get some schoolwork done if you're up anyhow. Like listening to the BBC, you might also inadvertently find that you have no problem falling asleep.
