Life

Which Of These 4 Sleep Schedules Do You Have?

Up until this point, we have understood there to be two types of people in the world: morning people ("larks"), or those who prefer to be awake too early for the rest of us to comprehend, and night people ("owls"), or those who prefer to sleep in and stay up later into the evening. But researchers have found that instead of two, there actually may be four types of sleep schedules our biology supports, and even though I'll never understand why everyone doesn't just want to party all night and sleep all day, it turns out a significant number of people actually fall into that sleep schedule grey area.

In a recent study conducted by Biologist Arcady Putilov from the Russian Academy of Sciences, 130 people were asked to stay awake for 24 hours and then answer questions about how they felt and had functioned during the previous week. A little over 70 of those subjects fell into either the category of "lark" or "owl" but the rest reported something slightly different. Around 25 people reported feeling energetic in both the morning and evening, while 32 reported feeling lethargic all day.

While it's cool that people get the opportunity to classify themselves as something other than two birds who just happen to sleep differently, the study definitely needs some work, a bigger sample size, and a closer study of what the deprivation did to the brain. Besides, one 24-hour interval cannot determine your sleep patterns as a whole. One thing is for certain though — no matter when you sleep and how you feel at different times of the day because of it, we all need to sleep for a certain period of time, every 24 hours, no matter what, and that should be the most important takeaway from this study that we oftentimes forget.