Avoiding late dinners, but exercising in morning key to retraining night owls

Are you a night owl who needs help training your mind and body to get up earlier? A new study has revealed a few tricks to help you wake up two hours earlier and not lose a wink of sleep while you readjust.

Night owls can retrain themselves to wake up two hours earlier and still get the same amount of sleep in just three weeks, a new Melbourne study has found.

The Monash University trial found that resetting sleep habits also reduced levels of stress, depression and morning sleepiness, while shifting peak cognitive and physical performance to earlier in the day.

Simple tweaks to the timing of exercise and meals, maximising light exposure in the mornings and keeping strict sleep and wake times every day of the week, all helped people whose body clocks are inherently wired to go to bed after midnight to make their body clocks more in line with the typical 9-5 working day.

Lead researcher Dr Elise Facer-Childs, from Monash’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, said while those who went to bed late were often deemed lazy and not productive, there were biological and environmental factors that made some people feel better at night.

“There are really clear biological, hormonal, physiological and genetic differences between morning larks and night owls,” Dr Facer-Childs said.

“When you are chopping and changing your schedule to go against your biological rhythm, that’s been linked to a lot of health problems.

“Night owls tend to be compromised by society.”

Night owls can retrain their brain so they can wake up two hours earlier.

A parliamentary inquiry into sleep held last year found that 40 per cent of Australians are not getting enough sleep, which contributes to more than 3000 deaths each year.

Dr Facer-Childs said working with University of Birmingham colleagues, they wanted to test whether simple sleep hygiene changes, not medications, could change sleep habits over three weeks in 22 adults, compared to the control group who were only told to eat lunch at the same time every day.

Night owls who followed the schedule — people who were typically going to bed at 2.45am before the study — were able to get to sleep at 1am and wake up at 8.30am. They were still getting their 7.5 hours sleep each night and sleeping just as soundly.

Their peak cognitive and physical performance also shifted from 8pm to 3pm for grip strength, and to noon for reaction times.

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They also ate breakfast more often, and stuck to more regular and earlier meal times throughout the rest of the day.

“The body clock thrives off routine. The more regular you are, the better it is,” she said.

“Part of our biological clock in the liver is affected by food, and the clock in our brain is affected by light.

“If you’re having meals late at night, or not being exposed to light in the mornings, that’s why we get that disruption.”

The findings were published in the journal Sleep Medicine.