What is your chronotype and can you change it?

During her recent Q&A with Mammoth, Dr Nicola Barclay, Sleep Scientist and Psychologist, explains how you can establish your sleep chronotype and how you should amend your sleep routine accordingly…

“Most people have a good sense of what their chronotype is. If you ask anybody, are you a morning person or an evening person? Everyone seems to have a good sense of whether they wake up very nicely early in the morning or whether they can stay up late in the evening – you have a good sense of that. But to really understand how extreme your chronotype is, you need to think do you need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning? If you do need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, then chances are you’re probably not a morning type and you’re probably not getting enough sleep. You need to be able to wake up naturally and wake up feeling refreshed without an alarm.

But ways that you can try to manipulate your circadian rhythm if you like, is more manageable if you’re evening type actually. So if you’re an evening type and wanting to push your bedtime a little bit earlier, then we can control things such as light. So light, as I mentioned earlier, is a potent stimulator of the circadian rhythm and during the 3 hours leading up to bedtime, we habitually secrete melatonin.

Now, melatonin is sometimes called the hormone of darkness. It chemically makes us feel sleepy, but it’s inhibited by light. So if we are at home or wherever we are, we’ve got bright lights on in the 3 hours leading up to bedtime, it’s going to inhibit melatonin and make it difficult for us to chemically feel sleepy. And so if you’re an evening type and you are wanting to stay up or you naturally stay up late, what you can do is really reduce your light exposure in the evening, maybe even more than 3 hours prior to bedtime to try to stimulate melatonin onset a little bit earlier and hopefully make you a little bit sleepier.

And what we can do the other side of things, in the morning expose yourself to as much bright light as possible. So, you know, make sure that you’ve got curtains. We talk a lot about having blackout curtains, which is great for the sleep period, but when we want to start naturally waking up in the morning, we need a bit of light exposure even through our eyelids to kick start the circadian rhythm, the alerting signal, and so making sure that we can have bright light exposure in the morning. There are some devices that stimulate sunrise that gets brighter and brighter and brighter according to certain times – so that can be really helpful in setting up the morning.”

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