The Morning Myth

by Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr.

  Poor balance: Lack of sleep negatively affects your balance and coordination, increasing your risk for injury.

  Yikes! And to think the sleep-shamers are doing all of this to far too many night owls! Let’s take a closer look at some issues in particular:

  Difficulty Concentrating and Other Mental Dysfunctions

  A 1997 National Sleep Foundation poll estimated that $1.8 billion in work productivity is lost due to fatigue in the workplace each year. (And that’s in two-decades-ago dollars.) The American Chiropractic Association has said that memory, decision-making ability, attention, and patience are just a few of the limiting issues associated with insufficient sleep.

  Imagine you bought a Ferrari, excited to finally drive at 200 mph, when your boss goes outside to the parking garage and puts a limiter on the car that caps the speed at 60 mph. You’d be furious. How dare your boss alter something that’s entirely out of his or her authority at work? Yet that’s what they’re doing to you, around the clock, when they force you to be at work bright and early in the morning. (Don’t you hate that “bright and early” cliché?) Forced early rising and the consequential sleep deprivation are the equivalent to putting such a limiter on your brain.

  “Sleep Debt”

  There’s a myth in society that you can cut your sleep hours short all week and then somehow make up for it on weekends. The sad truth is that you cannot, and the research is there to prove it. It makes one wonder if the early rising sleep-shamers made this one up just so we’d get up earlier!

  Negative Impact on Relationships

  You already know that early risers tend to be grouchy and on edge all the time, thanks to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. These same negative effects occur when you don’t get enough sleep, and can severely impact your interpersonal relationships. Inadequate sleep makes you more irritable, and it leaves you in a haze, or a state of “brain fog,” not allowing you to be fully present with your partner.

  Patrick Finan, PhD, a sleep researcher at Johns Hopkins University, points out that insufficient sleep raises your obesity risk by 50%, can triple your risk of type 2 diabetes, and is tied to a 33% increase in your risk for dementia. So get enough sleep, dammit!

  The One-Sided Story That Won’t Go Away

  In an article by Alyss Bowen on Grazia, entitled “Can We Please Stop Sleep Shaming Everyone?” she asks, “Can we just not?” Ironically, she’s an early riser, but living in the UK, she’s clearly more enlightened than Americans on this topic.

  “What time did you wake up this morning? Was it at around 6 a.m. so you could put on your gym kit and head out the door to go on a casual 8.5 km run before your sleeping flatmates arose from their slumber? Or perhaps it was 30 minutes after your pre-set alarm, because you’d spent the past 30 minutes snoozing, clinging on to those last moments of sleep before you had to face the commute to work?”

  She then goes on to wonder why there are 348 million Google results for “the top 7 benefits of waking up early,” and “healthy reasons to be up early,” when scientific and medical studies entirely contradict those myths. She was even concerned about not being quite “clever” enough herself after reading studies showing that night owls are both smarter and more creative!

  Maybe enough early risers will ask the same kinds of questions and start making positive changes for the rest of us if we get enough copies of this book into their hands.

  Bowen goes on to admit that while she’s up, wired, and ready for the day at 6:45 a.m., she’s yawning “enough for three people” come night.

  In a separate article, Kate Hughes wonders why there’s no water-shaming for people who get the recommended eight cups a day of water, yet society shames people for getting the recommended eight hours of sleep.

  Enough is enough already.

  Unintended Sleep-Shaming Is Everywhere

  Headspace has been the app I’ve used in the past to attempt to learn to meditate, the key word here being attempt. Knowing that several more have come to market since Headspace debuted, I was checking out reviews and comparisons of various meditation apps when I saw this article in the sidebar: “The Ultimate Guide to Being a Morning Person.”

  Just when I was in a great mood, feeling productive, having just chatted with my doctor about which app he uses, I was slapped in the face with this bit of sleep-shaming.

  Now don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the author of this article is, first, a natural morning person—they’re the only people who believe that anyone can become a morning person too—and second, that the author has been hammered from birth with the brainwashing and believes there’s value in perpetuating it.

  This is not what I wanted to stumble upon while seeking to better learn meditation and live life more mindfully!

  Since this is a topic that obviously interests me, I read the article, and it was utter rubbish. The “advice” to become a morning person was to lay your clothes out the night before (duh), do squats while brushing your teeth (which can lead to injury or muscle strain in night owls), set an alarm for everything, right down to when you should get dressed (talk about adding needless stress to mornings), read your to-do list aloud while in the shower (seriously?), and while getting ready to head out the door, repeat aloud the things you need to bring, such as wallet, keys, phone, and so on.

  In summary, this article had nothing of value that would help someone to get up earlier. Instead it was written by yet another self-serving morning person, who needed to come up with something to write about to fulfill her journalistic obligations for the day, and sadly chose to write an utterly useless article that does nothing other than sleep-shame those of us who don’t get up before the sun.

  One thing I’ll grant the author is that she probably did not intend to sleep-shame the rest of us. She merely echoed her own daily routine, which seems needlessly rushed and stressful to me, and, of course, morning people love to read articles like this one to validate their own sleep habits. Why else would another author have pointed out that there are 348 million Google search results on why it’s better to be an early riser, when virtually every bit of science on the subject contradicts all of it? It’s because cheap journalism is about telling people what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear, so that readers will rave about the author and post great reviews.

  And the unintended consequence of all this, or at least I hope it’s unintended, is to sleep-shame and make night owls feel inferior. As always, many will try to follow this advice and only hurt their success prospects in the long run and cause unnecessary health problems to boot.

  Night Owls Are Tired of Being Discriminated Against

  In an article on Vox.com by Brian Resnick in April 2018, he explained why forcing night owls to comply with a morning-centric schedule will lead to severe health problems and premature death, along with the fact that chronotypes are inborn and that night owls cannot simply just become morning people, topics we’ve already covered. (Lots of luck trying to explain that to the self-serving morning people who impose those schedules.)

  In conclusion, he writes:

  In 2016, when I first reported on the science of chronobiology, I spoke to several people with delayed sleep phase, a condition that puts people on the extreme end of the night-owl chronotype. These people have a hard time falling asleep before 2 or 3 a.m. and prefer to sleep until around noon. There’s nothing wrong with their sleep other than that their schedules for it are shifted.

  These late sleepers are tired of being judged for a behavior they cannot easily control. If they can’t change their sleep patterns, maybe society should become more accepting of them. We tend to assume that late wakers are the partiers, the deadbeats, the ones who are so irresponsible they can’t keep a basic schedule. The people I spoke to found these assumptions to be personally damaging.

  We should follow common sense for a solution. People should be able to sleep when their bodies demand it. Considering the potential health impacts of ignoring our biological c
locks, it seems harmless enough to try. [Emphasis mine]

  Night Owls, Sleep-Shaming, and Depression

  There are endless studies out there claiming that early risers are statistically happier, and to a large degree, they’re right. However, much like how studies showing that early risers perform better at work and at school are flawed due to the fact that such studies heavily favor early risers, so are studies claiming early risers are happier. They’re statistically happier because they get to live life on their natural sleep schedules. What those researchers are not willing to talk about is the fact that so many night owls are unhappy, not because they’re night owls—you’ve seen why we’re more relaxed than morning people—but rather, because of being forced to live a life of compliance with early morning schedules and the ensuing sleep deprivation and even depression that follow.

  While I’ve never personally experienced depression, I spent years going through the cycle of drinking to excess at night in order to fall asleep, usually combined with some kind of sleep aid such as Unisom, followed by excessive amounts of caffeine in the morning to get going again. Because I’d been doing this for so long, I reached the point where I no longer experienced hangovers after downing an entire bottle of white wine or a few generous drams of whisky the night before; however, I was feeling the effects of misusing alcohol and drinking to excess.

  Most people are aware that heavy drinkers are an irritable lot, and I was no exception. I was constantly grouchy, pessimistic, constantly complaining about everything … you name it. All of that because I couldn’t fall asleep at a reasonable hour without the stuff and wanted to avoid the “Z-Drugs” such as Ambien, which are far, far more addictive than alcohol. On top of that, many users report feeling like a zombie the next day, which entirely defeats the purpose of taking a sleep aid; what’s the point when you’re just as tired and brain-fogged the next day as if you had a night of insomnia?

  Bear with me for a moment while I explain why alcohol causes anxiety, a problem I eventually came face-to-face with: Alcohol causes relaxation and drowsiness by binding to the GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptors in the brain. This is also how the benzodiazepine drugs work, which include Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, and the infamous Rophonyl (commonly known as the date rape drug “roofie”), among many others.

  The reason Xanax in particular is so extremely addictive—multitudes more are addicted to it than to opioids—is because it’s one of the most powerful of the bunch, and also one of the shortest acting, if not the shortest acting. What happens to Xanax users is that they experience either severe anxiety or feel a panic attack coming on, and pop a pill in response. What that pill does, much like alcohol, is bind to the GABA receptors in the brain, and since GABA is the relaxation neurotransmitter, the user feels a deep sense of calm and relaxation in anywhere from five to 15 minutes; Xanax comes on strong and it comes on fast.

  However, when the drug wears off after three to four hours, the anxiety comes back—but this time, it’s even worse! The user then takes another … and another … and the cycle continues to repeat itself into a nasty downward spiral. That’s why Xanax in particular can cause physical addiction in as little as two days, and yet it’s the most prescribed drug in America. (Meanwhile the ill-intentioned DEA and both state and federal lawmakers are singularly obsessed with regulating opioid painkiller drugs despite the fact that Xanax is far more dangerous and is ruining far more lives.)

  This is also where the myth that alcohol is a sugar comes from. There’s a very misguided belief that the reason you wake up a few hours after passing out drunk is because the so-called sugar in alcohol jolts you awake. This is totally, completely incorrect. Ethanol, the kind of alcohol we drink, is an alcohol. Sugar, meanwhile, is sugar. Ethanol cannot be a sugar any more than a fat can be a carbohydrate. It’s chemically impossible.

  Anyway, what really happens when you drink too much and then can’t sleep a few hours later is exactly what happens when Xanax wears off: The GABA receptors in the brain rebound to a high enough degree to offset the time that they were depressed, and … boom! You’re wide awake!

  One listed side effect of benzodiazepine drugs such as Xanax is that they can lead to depression. That’s because artificially activated levels of GABA literally depress the rest of the brain. That’s where the calmness and tranquility these drugs produce come from; however, over time they can make the user permanently depressed.

  The same is true with alcohol, since it’s also a “GABAergic” drug; in fact, alcohol is classified as a depressant! To put that in perspective, it does the opposite of what antidepressants do: Alcohol actually causes depression when used long-term.

  And on that note, it’s why night owls who use alcohol nightly, or any of the other mentioned drugs, including sleeping pills such as Ambien and Lunesta, which also work by activating GABA receptors in the brain, are highly prone to depression versus the rest of the population that doesn’t struggle to get up early to get to work in time.

  As to caffeine, it has a surprisingly long biological half-life. In plain English, that means it hangs around in your body much longer than you’d like to think it does. And what happens when we’re not only trying to get to sleep hours earlier than our normal time, but are also still unknowingly wired by caffeine?

  That’s right, we go right back to using sleep aids, whether it happens to be a few Benadryl tablets or copious amounts of Scotch. And the endless cycle goes on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad mortem. Night owls get stuck in a continuous cycle of poisoning themselves day and night, all to be able to cope with a morning work schedule. And it goes without saying that all of these various drugs—alcohol, caffeine, and others—negatively impact our cognitive ability and performance at work, making the prospect of promotions and pay raises all the more difficult to attain.

  Nick Norton, who holds the very impressive triple-crown title of law student, yogi, and writer, wrote an article for Huffington Post, dated December 6, 2017, entitled “Diary of a Depressed Night Owl: The Search for Happiness Late into the Evening.”

  It was this paragraph in particular that really grabbed my attention: “In addition to having a higher probability of success behind them, early risers are also statistically more happy. In many ways, that makes sense. Night owls are more likely to have to rely on sleeping pills or alcohol to go to sleep and caffeine to wake them up. When awake late into the night, I’m probably stressing about having to go to work or school the following morning. Even waking up late on a day off can be depressing because a whole day feels wasted.”

  So it’s not just alcohol, caffeine, benzos, and other drugs that can lead to depression in night owls who are forced to fight their inner clock. It’s also the experience of insomnia and lying awake all night, consumed with anxiety over having to wake so early. And his comment about feeling depressed over waking up late on a day off? There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s society’s sleep-shaming and constant denigration of night owls that causes such guilt.

  As Mr. Burns in The Simpsons said so well, “A happy worker is a productive worker.” When employers finally take heed and allow their night owl employees to be happy, things will be better for everyone all around.

  As a fitting conclusion to this chapter, I’d like to point out that while Xanax may be the single most prescribed drug in America, antidepressants are the most prescribed class of drugs. Like Xanax, they’re nothing to mess around with or take lightly, and one must wonder if the explosion in antidepressant prescriptions in recent years is directly connected to the fact that forced early rising frequently leads to depression in night owls.

  Antidepressant drugs are just as addictive—I’ve watched a relative go through a living hell trying to get off one after taking it for only one week. That one week turned into three months of slowly tapering off the drug in order to avoid severe withdrawals. And if that’s not enough to give you pause, consider the fact that all but one mass shooter in the past 50 years were taking antidepressants, and t
hat recently unsealed medical records of Frank Sinatra revealed that he passed away due to complications of taking an antidepressant and not from natural causes. Think about that.

  Morning Madness

  Our society harshly penalizes those who discriminate against people of different races, sexual identity, religion, and rightly so, yet the very real existence of discrimination against night people is widely accepted by society despite the very real and severe dangers to the health of night people who are forced to rise with the early birds. This is another example of the tyranny of the majority, something that African Americans, LGBTQ people, and many other groups managed to combat through endless hard work, vigilance, and, most of all, a simple refusal to tolerate further discrimination. The time has come for night owls to band together and do the same. Discrimination is discrimination regardless of whom it’s being committed against, and it’s always wrong regardless of which group is being targeted.

  Note

  1In sales it’s not uncommon for a company to pay a salesperson a bit extra for the first few months, or “start-up” pay, until he or she gets commissions coming in, which of course this particular person never did.

  CHAPTER 13

  Diet, Nutrition, and Other Secrets to Better, Deeper Sleep

  Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.

  —James Thurber

  DISCLAIMER: The information presented from hereon in is based on my own personal experience along with thousands of hours of research. I am not a doctor and don’t pretend to be one, so it’s essential that you check with your healthcare provider prior to using any dietary supplements or any other advice given.