Sleep Chronotypes What’s Yours?

When someone asks what type of person you are with regard to being your best self in the morning or at night, the automatic response is like the toss of a coin, two-sided and either-or in response: early bird or night owl. According to a 2019 study, however, the variety in circadian rhythm fluctuation across different persons and when they feel sleepy within a 24-hour period actually exhibits two other sleep personality-types, or chronotypes, in addition to the morning and the evening: the afternoon and the napper.

Cortisol is a wakefulness hormone, while melatonin is a canceller of that effect so that we can sleep. Cortisol production promoted by daylight and melatonin by darkness, they nevertheless fluctuate besides such stimulus throughout each day – and that’s what determines a sleep chronotype, outside of and in addition to genetic cause, the age factor, and one’s environment. The pandemic and the necessary WFH lifestyle might have changed our sleep patterns somewhat, but essentially which type are you?

You wake before the alarm, never sleep in on weekends, and can quite happily work away from first light. Physically, this means your cortisol release happens earlier than average in a 24hour period. However, by extension, it also means your melatonin is released earlier in the evening and so you’re known for going to bed relatively early.

Early Bird (The Morning Type)

The Afternoon Type

Most alert in the afternoon, mornings aren’t particularly your favourite part of the day, but from 5pm onward you’re feeling tired again. Very much a daytime person, then, you pretty much suit the modern work schedule and couldn’t possibly imagine drafting documents pre-dawn, nor slogging through preparatory work for tomorrow’s meeting after supper. And that’s okay: you do you.

Night Owl (The Evening Type)

You love that snooze button, don’t you? Not one for meaningful conversation of a morning, your true energy sparkles as the sun dips once more beneath the horizon’s edge. Inversely to early birds, your cortisol is being released far later than most folk, while your melatonin release stage might not occur before midnight’s struck and most others had hit the sack long ago (or turned into pumpkins).

The Napper Type

You’re a bit of enigma: perky as an early bird in the mornings, and content to keep up with the night owls for as long as you can come the night, the napper can do what they do in seeming Energiser-bunny style because between roughly 2pm and 3pm they steal a bit of shuteye to recharge (we won’t tell if you don’t). However, the body battery boost won’t last long after 10pm.

Good Mood Food for Grey Days

Nutritional psychology looks more closely at the relationship between our dietary and nutrient intake patterns and the effects on our mood, our behaviour, and mental health. Mind-body nutrition, then: that essential symbiotic connection. Through conscious reappraisal of our habits – a guided journey to develop perception, cognition, and our psychological skillset – that assessment of our DMHR (Diet-Mental Health Relationship) can result in an epiphanic moment of discovery of why it is we feel the way we do about ourselves, brain, body, and beyond.

A 2019 study in European Neuropharmacology: the journal of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology stated that “the scientific evidence demonstrating the unequivocal link between nutrition and mental health is only beginning to emerge”. In other words, just like new discoveries orbiting around the central place of our gut microbiome in overall health, we are on the cusp of enlightenment in general when it comes to physical wellbeing and optimum psychological health. Indeed, Giuseppe Grosso’s 2021 study, ‘Nutritional Psychiatry: How Diet Affects Brain through Gut Microbiota’ posited that research into the “gut-brain-axis” is facilitating development of the new discipline of “nutritional psychiatry” against a background setting of “the ‘stressogenic’ environment we live in”.

Let’s face it: today is not yesterday; it certainly isn’t the past that was everyday life for our ancestors. Just as we are genetically mismatched with industrialised seed oils, so we are struggling in the exceedingly competitive society that we have created. Our genetic heritage does not suit the new and jarring rhythms of the “information revolution” that has taken place in the past half century: the longer days (hello, electricity), the hours upon hours sat static in front of blue-lit screens of computers and Smartphones, the not just creeping urbanization but seeming countryside obliteration of expanding bounds of cities and their commuter belts; the suburbs become the “new green” landscape. When you talk to a child and ask them what they think of when they consider the Earth and their response is houses and roads, you know you have a real disconnect and a critical problem for tomorrow.

In fact, that problem is here today and – climate considerations aside – it is a psychological one. So grave is the issue that it has been projected that by 2030 the leading cause of “disease burden globally” will be mental health. A 2021 Spanish study published in the journal Nutrients stated that, in Catalonia, “only 14% of people over the age of 15 consume five or more servings of F&V [fruit and vegetables] a day”. The situation is similar in the US and Europe, with some 200lb of meat being eaten by the average American in just one year. The anti-inflammatory benefits of a plant-based diet have been well-publicised, but when it comes especially to helping our mood, there are certain foods that are great for our emotional well-being (and no, we don’t mean a plate full of cookies; though, occasionally, a sweet treat harms no-one).

Wholegrain bread Fortified wholegrain bread is a good source of B vitamins, crucially important for brain health, as well as carbohydrates metabolization for energy. B vitamins also assist with stress management.

Avocado Depression being linked to a deficiency in folate, avocados provide a delicious source of it. Additionally rich in antioxidants, this is one food with heart-healthy fats that you want to be including in your diet.

Porridge Rich in soluble fibre, which helps regulate blood sugar (and mood) in similar vein to berries – oats also contain selenium and cholesterollowering beta-glucans.

Just Natural Organic Porridge Oats 500g £1.79 Berries Full of fibre, slow-digesting fibre helps stabilise blood sugar, which helps us avoid sudden dips and low mood. From flavonoid-plenteous blueberries to raspberries, add some to a serving of soya yogurt at the breakfast table.

Tomatoes Containing lycopene, which has been connected to reduced risk of depression, why not serve up a salad of tomatoes and avocado?

Chia Seeds Hello, Omega-3 fatty acids. Awesome for brain health and mood regulation, chia seeds have a hearty quantity of magnesium, too, which has been shown to calm the mind and assist that lovely tumble into slumber.

Just Natural Organic Chia Seeds 250g £1.99

Find the range in your local health food retailer