The Morning Myth Read online

  Night people are more intelligent: Psychologist Richard D. Roberts of the University of Sydney and Patrick C. Kyllonen of the Air Force Research Lab completed a study into chronotypes in 1999 published in Personality and Individual Differences. They measured the chronotypes of 420 test participants, then administered intelligence tests. The study found that night people marginally outperformed morning people on most of the intelligence measures. The most significant differences were found in working memory and processing speed. These findings were true even when the tests were taken in the morning. (Learning Mind)

  Morning people aren’t wealthier: Catharine Gale and Christopher Martyn from MRC Environmental Epidemiology Unit, Southampton University, also studied chronotypes. They analyzed a national sample of men and women who’d been surveyed years earlier on sleep patterns as well as measures related to health, wealth, and wisdom. The group included 356 morning larks and 318 night owls. The results showed that overall night owls had larger incomes than larks. (Learning Mind)

  Why I Did All This Research

  The obvious reason I researched and wrote this book was to eliminate the belief that there’s something wrong with me (or you) or that we’re “lazy” for being late risers. No, it wasn’t to make myself feel better about being a night owl, although that did happen!

  I did it to refute a free report written and distributed by a friend and fellow best-selling author as a “lead magnet” to get people into his website and buy his time-management program. The report claimed that the one thing all billionaires and other highly successful people have in common is that they’re very early risers, as in rising at 4:00 to 5:00 a.m.

  I called BS!

  Why? Because there is no proof to back that up.

  I chose to do my own research, with the help of a research assistant, and what I found astonished me: Night owls overall are more successful than morning people! At a minimum I assumed we all performed the same, overall, but merely at different times. The reality, however, is that night owls are more prosperous in general.

  Comparing the traits and habits that these people had in common not only refuted the report’s claim, but in general revealed nothing other than the fact that morning people have a circadian rhythm at or close to 24 hours, while night owls were on the other end of that scale, with a circadian rhythm of somewhere between 24.5 and 25 hours. It’s that extra hour our body wants that makes us get up later than others, and makes us feel exhausted all day when we don’t get it.

  This is genetic, it’s permanent, and it cannot be changed!

  How to Use This Book

  The purpose of this book is fourfold:

  To cure you of any insecurity or belief that there’s something wrong with you, or that you’re “lazy” for rising later than morning people—and to restore your self-confidence. Have you ever noticed how morning people can’t state that they are early birds without sounding as if they are asking “Aren’t I a goody-goody?” I’ve noticed it, too, and it’s arrogant and unnecessary. Sadly, these are the same people behind the popular myth that night owls are “lazy.” Heck, maybe we should start calling them out on their inability to keep up with us past mid- to late afternoon! After all, studies show that the early bird may catch the worm, but he can’t go the distance. Morning people typically begin to fade and lose a significant degree of concentration, cognitive function, and memory shortly after 3:00 p.m. every day. Night owls, on the other hand, can go the distance, and are productive for far more hours each day than morning people.

  To show you how to make the most of your night owl circadian rhythm, and how to make it work for you and not against you—and outperform all those goody-goody morning people! I’m also going to tell you what to avoid in your diet that may interfere with sleep and help you to be more productive than you ever previously imagined.

  To help you enjoy better health. After all, scientists have learned that waking before daylight is harmful for your health and throwing off natural sleep patterns can cause hormonal imbalances and increase risks of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and depression! That’s because when daylight comes, your body stops producing melatonin, the sleep hormone, and a spike in cortisol occurs to help you to wake up. But if you rise before dawn, your body is still producing melatonin unless you use a sleep therapy light when you awaken, which still takes considerable time to work. The cortisol rush doesn’t come until daylight, and if you rose before dawn, it will present as anxiety or “the jitters,” which in turn raises blood pressure and overall wreaks havoc on those two all-important hormones, among many others. High cortisol also massively decreases immune function, so if you get to work bright and early and the person in the next cubicle is sneezing and coughing, don’t be surprised if you get sick too.

  To teach employers how to get the most productivity possible from employees by working with them on schedules based upon their natural sleep cycles.

  So if you’ve been self-conscious about your night owl-ness, or suffer from low self-confidence, and are tired of the criticism that far too many morning people throw at us, rest assured. You now know that you’re at a distinct advantage over them, and now you’re going to learn how to use your night owl tendencies to get ahead, be successful, and, as Ben Franklin put it, to be a healthy, wealthy, and wise night owl!

  I wish you all the best and am glad that you’re also a part of the night owl family!

  Frank J. Rumbauskas

  October 2018

  Dallas, Texas

  Note

  *I learned from reading Mark Twain’s books that his grandfather was close friends with Benjamin Franklin, and that Franklin was part of the “do as I say, not as I do” crowd. In fact, he admitted himself that he awakened at 9:00 a.m. every day and stayed in bed to read the morning newspaper. The lesson: Don’t believe everything you hear unless it’s supported by evidence!

  CHAPTER 1

  Confessions of a Stigmatized Night Owl: How Early Rising Nearly Destroyed My Business (and Did Destroy My Education)

  Let me tell you my own personal story of the living hell of being a night owl in a society that seems to begin the workday at the crack of dawn, while I would have preferred getting up at the crack of noon all the while.

  A Very Annoyed Five-Year-Old

  No matter how far back I think in my lifetime, I can always remember being forced out of bed earlier than I should have been.

  The memories go all the way back to elementary school. Maybe it was kindergarten, maybe it was first grade. All I remember is my mom coming into my bedroom, turning on the lights, setting out clothes for me to wear for the day, and haranguing me to get moving.

  She didn’t mean anything negative by it. (I love you, Mom!) She only wanted me to do well in school, having been raised in a generation when school actually mattered. After all, school is school and we couldn’t control what time the school day started.

  Even now, despite our kids naturally waking around 7:00 a.m. on most days, we sometimes have to gently wake them, particularly our youngest who tends to take after me rather than my wife. Oh, and if anyone doesn’t like being woken too early, it’s my younger daughter, Maeve! (Well, besides myself, that is, although, ironically, she does go to bed on her own when she’s tired. If we’re visiting family or vice versa, she’ll even fight to go to bed! Thankfully she’s easily guilt-tripped. “But everyone is here just to see you!” She eats that one up.)

  I remember those boring school days as if I were still there. The experience of spending all day in school watching the clock, trying to pay attention, watching the clock, sitting in a hard wooden desk that I can still smell, watching the clock, sweating my ass off both early and late in the school year (public schools in Linden, New Jersey, didn’t have air conditioning back then), and dreading the day’s homework assignments. Did I mention watching the clock? In fact, it was the boredom and rigidity of traditional schooling that compelled my wife and me to send our kids to private school—or at least to the type of school wh
ere learning is made to be fun and kids learn by doing, not by drudgery and rote memorization. (The school’s motto is that a child is a lamp to be lighted, not a vessel to be filled with useless information. I couldn’t agree more, though they don’t actually use the words “useless information.” I added that.)

  Perhaps more accurately, school was boring and rigid for me. That’s most likely because I would have rather slept in for a couple of extra hours and actually been ready for the day, but I neither had a choice in the matter, nor did I have any idea I was a night owl. However, not all kids are natural night owls to begin with, and not all teenagers tend to be extreme night owls. (If you’re in doubt, and you have teenage kids, think of the fun of getting them to bed on time! Although if their grades suck, now you know why. Hopefully.) Other kids enjoyed school. Some even loved it. I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong; my grades were stellar and I almost always brought home straight A’s, at least before I checked my brain out of school entirely. I just hated being dragged out of bed to sit in a classroom to learn boring subjects that I’d never use in real life, especially when they were taught primarily by people who never left school in the first place!

  Like any good kid, I told my parents I liked school. After all, I had good grades and didn’t want to disappoint them. But I hated it. And I never fully understood why.

  At least not until about 10 years later.

  High School Hell

  High school was hell. No, not the kind of high school that you see in 1980s movies, with the jocks throwing the nerds in lockers and giving them wedgies and all that, though that certainly went on. (And high school for me really was in the 1980s.) Granted, I was a nerd, but got along well with most anyone, just like I still do today. The only difference is that I was a major introvert as a kid and I’m an extrovert as an adult, the result of a very successful sales career followed by lots and lots of public speaking as a best-selling author. Or at least I think that’s why. I met my wife in 2004 and she still refuses to believe that I was ever an introvert, while my family back in New Jersey cannot fathom the concept that I’m now extroverted and love to show up at networking mixers and business roundtables and the Rotary Club (which is full of younger people now—it’s not your grandpa’s Rotary Club anymore), Dad’s nights put on by both the school and by us on our own time, and other venues where I could meet and mingle with new people.

  After all, what I primarily do for a living—high-level sales process consulting with VPs and C-Suite executives—isn’t exactly conducive to networking. CEOs don’t go to networking mixers, nor do VPs; they’re simply too busy. Nor would they benefit from them, either. Indeed, they’d find themselves surrounded by people who cannot help them, and you don’t reach the C-Suite by wasting time. So when I go to an event, it’s to enjoy good conversation and the company of others.

  Compare that to when I was 10 years old or so and would go hide in my room when relatives came to visit. I’m being totally serious.

  (If you’re wondering how I can talk and work with CEOs on their level without an education, the Harvard Business Review “Essentials” series is beyond valuable. You’ll learn everything you need to know and save a hundred grand on that MBA!)

  It was in middle school that I stopped bringing home straight A grades. Okay, I wasn’t bringing home D’s and F’s either, but in my house, all hell broke loose without all A’s on the report card. (Thank God my kids don’t have to deal with report cards, for their sakes!)

  Natural Law stated that, as a nerd, I must hate gym class, which I did. In middle school I used to just cut gym and instead do some extra credit work in a science class, which always helped me to avoid getting busted for skipping gym. Besides, the locker room smelled something awful.

  So when high school came around, I enrolled in the school’s Navy JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps). I had zero interest in the military, which would later change, thanks to JROTC, even though I never served. The reason I joined is because it replaced gym class. In other words, for four years of high school, I never had to attend gym class once. And that was okay because the physical training in JROTC was far superior to playing sports in gym class anyway! (Although that became a lot more fun as a senior when I was able to order the freshmen to do push-ups.)

  There was a problem, though …

  You see, for my first two years of high school, homeroom started at 8:05 a.m. After homeroom, instead of heading to gym class, I went across the street to Navy JROTC class every day.

  It worked out great until I reached my junior year. Because both were able to hold officer ranks in our company, juniors and seniors were combined into one JROTC class, which was held at … [drum roll please] … 7:15 a.m.!

  Don’t get me wrong—I loved JROTC. Loved it. I loved everything I learned, I loved hearing our instructors’ war stories (literally), I loved putting on a Navy uniform once a week, I loved learning how to shoot well on rifle team … I just didn’t love the early hour. About the only thing worse was being awakened by flying trashcans at 5:00 a.m. when they sent us to boot camp at the U.S. Coast Guard’s recruit training facility in Cape May, New Jersey, known as “Camp Snoopy” to the drill instructors.

  Can you seriously imagine me getting up so freaking early so I could get to school by 7:15 a.m.? Keep in mind that I frequently walked the mile from home to class. (Okay, fine, 0.9 miles.) Double the annoyance for having to salute some higher-ranking kids I didn’t like, or the many times I slipped and fell on ice walking in the winter.

  At least I was a step ahead of my best friend Tom from back in those days, who would often show up as late as 7:45 a.m., thanks to one shared bathroom in his house.

  Just like now, if I have to get up super early, I do fine for a while, at least until the crash hits in the early to mid afternoon. (This happens to so-called morning people, too, though they’ll deny it all the way to the grave. You’ll learn the scientific and medical reasons why further on in this book.)

  Having said all that, I actually looked forward to the class every day. In fact, for a nerd who initially had no interest in anything military, I came to love JROTC and it was not only my favorite class in high school, but the discipline learned there became a valuable lifetime skill and it still benefits me even today, nearly three decades after graduating from high school. My instructors have passed on and I only wish I could tell them how much they contributed to my success.

  Obviously, the class wasn’t the problem. The problem was later on. I did fine until lunchtime. Then I ate and the slump hit … but for me, the quintessential night owl, it never went away.

  That’s when my grades began to go to hell. (Which is why I didn’t get into any of the military academies I applied to, nor did I get a college ROTC scholarship.) Indeed, it wasn’t until I began outlining this book that I put two and two together and realized that my grades crashed exactly when I had to start getting up an hour earlier!

  After dragging my way through the school day, struggling to understand subjects like mathematics and chemistry that I’d always aced without even trying, I came home each and every day and went straight to my bedroom for a nap.

  Seriously, without exception, I needed to nap every single day after school once the start time changed to 7:15 a.m. Even today if I have to get up early—for example, I belonged to a weekly 7:30 a.m. business roundtable group until it disbanded—I still have to get that nap in sometime during the afternoon. If I don’t, I get a much, much stronger “second wind” later on and then I cannot go to bed. (The “second wind” is another cortisol rush and, once it hits, good luck falling asleep.)

  From High School to College Dropout

  I never really wanted to go to college, but like I said, my parents grew up in the days when a degree wasn’t yet a commodity and having one was worth a fortune. I bought into the same myth because I didn’t know any better. I did beg and plead to take a year off before starting college, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Off I went to college. A
fter several years of being an amateur radio operator, something I started when I was 13 years old and continued through adulthood, particularly the public service aspect of it, I just knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I loved tinkering with electronics, and even had my first profitable business underway at 14 years old, buying antique radios for next to nothing at local swap meets (rarely more than five dollars), refurbishing them, then selling them via classified ads for over a hundred dollars each. That’s big money for a teenager. On top of that I used to go to work with my dad at AT&T Technologies pretty frequently during the summer, and was fascinated by everything I saw there; I even got to witness the very first prototype of a surface-mount circuit board being robot-assembled. (I have a feeling that only my fellow nerds will know what that is without looking it up, although I know they’re all drooling right now.)

  My very first class as a college student blindsided me. It seemed too good to be true. (And it was.) We all showed up in the lecture hall at 8:00 a.m., the professor came in, announced that it was way too early in the morning to have a class, and moved it to a later hour. Wow! “This place was made for me,” I thought. Wrong! All that meant was having 8:00 a.m. classes only four days a week instead of five. To add insult to injury, that professor turned out to be downright sadistic.

  The big problem was that my final two years of high school—when I had to be there at 7:15 a.m. and was brain-fried by early afternoon—left me ill prepared for one of the world’s toughest engineering schools.

  That night owl professor happened to be my calculus professor. The problem was that I flunked calculus in high school; it was in the postcrash hours of the afternoon, and then I flunked it again in college. The extreme fatigue I experienced from having to get up too early, in both venues, essentially took my brain offline as soon as it set in. And I, for one, cannot remember a damned thing when I’m that tired.