I am a rare natural lark (back when high schools still started too early for most teenagers' chronotypes, I was often the only one fully awake and alert in first period classes), and I find a vigorous morning workout energizes me for the rest of the day and too-vigorous exercise in the evening worsens my sleep. So, this tracks, as the kids say.
I wonder whether light, not vigorous, exercise _specifically after meals_ would show greater and less chronotype-dependent benefits due to the blood sugar regulation effect. Do we have any data on that, perhaps from CGM wearers?
It would make sense for larks that adding a walk after an evening meal for instance, would be beneficial without causing the sleep issues associated with late exercise. I wasn't able to find any clinical studies that have looked at this.
My understanding from what I have read is that you cannot really change your chronotype, although it tends to shift earlier as we get older - i.e., larks become more extreme larks, and extreme owls become moderate owls.
However, this contradicts my own personal experience. After a lifetime of being very much an owl, I turned into a lark in my late 40's. At first, this was not by choice - due to work and family obligations, there was a period in my mid-40s where I had to wake up at 4:45 AM. Since I have always been grouchy, sluggish, and incapable of doing anything other than staring blankly while chugging coffee when I wake up, I invested in a "Happy Light" which would simulate morning sunlight. Every morning, I drank my coffee by the light of the Happy Light, and I swear as soon as I turned it on I could feel my brain waking up.
After a year or two of this, my schedule changed and I no longer needed to wake up extremely early. However, much to my surprise, I found my body still wanted to get up at 5 AM. What's more, it wanted to to be physically active early in the morning. I discovered I had absolutely no problem doing early-morning workouts, and that doing so made me feel great all day.
I'm now 57 and I wake up around 5 am without an alarm clock; I'm at the gym by 6 AM. I'm usually in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM.
I wonder if the fact that I have ADHD is a confounding factor. As a child, I had a great deal of trouble falling asleep at night; my parents tried in vain to enforce a 9:00 bedtime when I was in elementary school, but I remember being completely unable to fall asleep and still being awake at 11:30 PM. I know it was 11:30 pm, because my night-owl mother always watched "The Odd Couple" before she went to bed, and it aired at 11:30 PM on one of the local channels. I have so many memories of surreptitiously reading books by flashlight under the covers or quietly playing with my toys next to the night-light and hearing the theme song playing from the living room.
Unsurprisingly, I also had a hard time waking up in the morning, and on weekends I would sleep until 11 AM or later if no one made me get up.
I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 36. One of my kids also has ADHD, and she has always been a night owl just like I was. After my diagnosis, it occurred to me that a lot of my owlish behavior was driven by me becoming hyper-focused on some sort of interesting activity in the evenings - I would stay up until all hours of the night drawing, knitting, reading, playing my violin, etc.. My daughter, who is now 23, is much the same - she frequently stays up until 2 AM working on knitting projects or making jewelry. Once I realized this, I started intentionally only doing boring things in hours before bedtime. I like to read, but my bedtime reading has to be rather dry non-fiction vs. an interesting mystery or an exciting science fiction story. If I watch TV, it has to be a sitcom I've seen a hundred times before - no drama, no adventure or suspense, nothing I have to think too hard about. Otherwise, I won't be able to turn my brain off and fall asleep.
So I wonder if my owlishness was more due to my ADHD rather than my biology? Like most people with ADHD, I tend to procrastinate even when the activity is something I enjoy doing - so I wouldn't get around to starting that craft project until 9 PM, and then I'd be unable to disengage from it and would still be doing it at 2 AM.
Also, further to William Wilson's comment about CARB syndrome, I also used to be a nighttime nosher, and like most people I liked snacking on carby things like pretzels, popcorn, toast, etc.. I am quite convinced that ADHD brains react much more strongly to sugar and refined carbs than "normal" people do; I have always noticed that if I eat carbs with breakfast (even "healthy" ones like oatmeal) I have a definite "crash" around 10:30 AM when I get foggy-minded, unable to focus, and oddly hungry. So, I imagine a lot of my owlishness was due to the inability to regulate my attention, compounded by elevated blood glucose from evening snacks.
In my mid-40's, around the same time that I had to start waking so very early for work, I also adopted a Paleo-type diet which eliminated sugar, grains and processed foods. I noticed right away that my ADHD symptoms improved a lot - I still had terrible short-term working memory, but I was a lot less impulsive, irritable and foggy-minded. I also stopped my evening snacking, because what fun is snacking if you can't eat processed crap like pretzels? So, perhaps my dramatic shift from owl to lark was more about ADHD and blood glucose levels than actual chronotype.
Thanks for the insightful article. I worked for Franz Halberg at the University of Minnesota back when God was a baby. Franz more or less started the field of chronobiology and circadian rhythms. Franz was a true pioneer, and his support pushed me to come up with my CARB syndrome theory to explain why everyone is now obese, and many people have brain disorders: https://carbsyndrome.com/
I am a rare natural lark (back when high schools still started too early for most teenagers' chronotypes, I was often the only one fully awake and alert in first period classes), and I find a vigorous morning workout energizes me for the rest of the day and too-vigorous exercise in the evening worsens my sleep. So, this tracks, as the kids say.
I wonder whether light, not vigorous, exercise _specifically after meals_ would show greater and less chronotype-dependent benefits due to the blood sugar regulation effect. Do we have any data on that, perhaps from CGM wearers?
It would make sense for larks that adding a walk after an evening meal for instance, would be beneficial without causing the sleep issues associated with late exercise. I wasn't able to find any clinical studies that have looked at this.
My understanding from what I have read is that you cannot really change your chronotype, although it tends to shift earlier as we get older - i.e., larks become more extreme larks, and extreme owls become moderate owls.
However, this contradicts my own personal experience. After a lifetime of being very much an owl, I turned into a lark in my late 40's. At first, this was not by choice - due to work and family obligations, there was a period in my mid-40s where I had to wake up at 4:45 AM. Since I have always been grouchy, sluggish, and incapable of doing anything other than staring blankly while chugging coffee when I wake up, I invested in a "Happy Light" which would simulate morning sunlight. Every morning, I drank my coffee by the light of the Happy Light, and I swear as soon as I turned it on I could feel my brain waking up.
After a year or two of this, my schedule changed and I no longer needed to wake up extremely early. However, much to my surprise, I found my body still wanted to get up at 5 AM. What's more, it wanted to to be physically active early in the morning. I discovered I had absolutely no problem doing early-morning workouts, and that doing so made me feel great all day.
I'm now 57 and I wake up around 5 am without an alarm clock; I'm at the gym by 6 AM. I'm usually in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM.
I wonder if the fact that I have ADHD is a confounding factor. As a child, I had a great deal of trouble falling asleep at night; my parents tried in vain to enforce a 9:00 bedtime when I was in elementary school, but I remember being completely unable to fall asleep and still being awake at 11:30 PM. I know it was 11:30 pm, because my night-owl mother always watched "The Odd Couple" before she went to bed, and it aired at 11:30 PM on one of the local channels. I have so many memories of surreptitiously reading books by flashlight under the covers or quietly playing with my toys next to the night-light and hearing the theme song playing from the living room.
Unsurprisingly, I also had a hard time waking up in the morning, and on weekends I would sleep until 11 AM or later if no one made me get up.
I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 36. One of my kids also has ADHD, and she has always been a night owl just like I was. After my diagnosis, it occurred to me that a lot of my owlish behavior was driven by me becoming hyper-focused on some sort of interesting activity in the evenings - I would stay up until all hours of the night drawing, knitting, reading, playing my violin, etc.. My daughter, who is now 23, is much the same - she frequently stays up until 2 AM working on knitting projects or making jewelry. Once I realized this, I started intentionally only doing boring things in hours before bedtime. I like to read, but my bedtime reading has to be rather dry non-fiction vs. an interesting mystery or an exciting science fiction story. If I watch TV, it has to be a sitcom I've seen a hundred times before - no drama, no adventure or suspense, nothing I have to think too hard about. Otherwise, I won't be able to turn my brain off and fall asleep.
So I wonder if my owlishness was more due to my ADHD rather than my biology? Like most people with ADHD, I tend to procrastinate even when the activity is something I enjoy doing - so I wouldn't get around to starting that craft project until 9 PM, and then I'd be unable to disengage from it and would still be doing it at 2 AM.
Also, further to William Wilson's comment about CARB syndrome, I also used to be a nighttime nosher, and like most people I liked snacking on carby things like pretzels, popcorn, toast, etc.. I am quite convinced that ADHD brains react much more strongly to sugar and refined carbs than "normal" people do; I have always noticed that if I eat carbs with breakfast (even "healthy" ones like oatmeal) I have a definite "crash" around 10:30 AM when I get foggy-minded, unable to focus, and oddly hungry. So, I imagine a lot of my owlishness was due to the inability to regulate my attention, compounded by elevated blood glucose from evening snacks.
In my mid-40's, around the same time that I had to start waking so very early for work, I also adopted a Paleo-type diet which eliminated sugar, grains and processed foods. I noticed right away that my ADHD symptoms improved a lot - I still had terrible short-term working memory, but I was a lot less impulsive, irritable and foggy-minded. I also stopped my evening snacking, because what fun is snacking if you can't eat processed crap like pretzels? So, perhaps my dramatic shift from owl to lark was more about ADHD and blood glucose levels than actual chronotype.
Thanks for the insightful article. I worked for Franz Halberg at the University of Minnesota back when God was a baby. Franz more or less started the field of chronobiology and circadian rhythms. Franz was a true pioneer, and his support pushed me to come up with my CARB syndrome theory to explain why everyone is now obese, and many people have brain disorders: https://carbsyndrome.com/