I think there's always been a tension between morning people and evening people. Those waking early are productive and accomplished. Those staying up late are up to no good.
A new study making the rounds looked at the self-reported energy patterns of 130 participants after staying awake for 24 hours. It breaks up this previous divide by showing that this association only accounts for 73 of 130 participants. There were significant portions whose energy levels (always high or always low) didn't follow a morning/evening pattern at all.
While I can't comment on whether this particular experiment was well designed to understand sleeping patterns and energy levels, it seems that just dividing people into morning people and evening people is a classic case of "high significance and low model fit." There's clearly a pattern, but it didn't really explain more than 56% of the observations.
I think it's an interesting note about the science journalism going on (an example here and here) both seem to leave the idea that the most important idea is what to call these new groups of people (anyone who's run a segmentation knows this phenomenon) rather than what these people tell the world about how we sleep and the role of sleep in our lives.
A new study making the rounds looked at the self-reported energy patterns of 130 participants after staying awake for 24 hours. It breaks up this previous divide by showing that this association only accounts for 73 of 130 participants. There were significant portions whose energy levels (always high or always low) didn't follow a morning/evening pattern at all.
While I can't comment on whether this particular experiment was well designed to understand sleeping patterns and energy levels, it seems that just dividing people into morning people and evening people is a classic case of "high significance and low model fit." There's clearly a pattern, but it didn't really explain more than 56% of the observations.
I think it's an interesting note about the science journalism going on (an example here and here) both seem to leave the idea that the most important idea is what to call these new groups of people (anyone who's run a segmentation knows this phenomenon) rather than what these people tell the world about how we sleep and the role of sleep in our lives.
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