I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of what 8am actually is. I've lived in places where 8am means you've already had 2-3 hours of sunlight and places where 8am is pitch black. Clock time and sun time don't always match.
Social time is another aspect, although linked more closely with clock time. After moving countries I found it very strange to see popular TV shows advertised with with a start time of half-past midnight. "Who would be up to watch it?" I thought. Of course, it turns out, there are plenty of people up watching TV at that time in this culture.
It's hard to say who is truly a night owl and for who it's a lifestyle.
I've always considered myself to be a night owl. I struggle to go to bed on time. Yet on some of my lengthy remote travels I learned it's all bullshit.
There, the sun sets at 6PM. There's little artificial light, and nothing much to do, so some 2 hours after dinner people tend to go to bed. So for weeks I went to bed around 9pm and wake up super fresh at 5-6am like some crazy morning person.
Just like that. Zero issues. So no, I'm not a night owl, it's distractions that make me not want to go to bed, it's not that I can't.
Best advice I received on my way to college: Don't take any 8:00 AM classes. You won't go.
As a night owl who was forced to wake up early all the first two decades of his life to kindergarten, school or university, all I can say is “no shit, Sherlock”.
I didn’t even choose to be a late sleeper, that’s how I always was. Yet the worldwide conspiracy to wake up absurdly early for any important matter is really annoying /s. As I’m approaching my 40s and am lucky enough to have a flexible schedule, waking up early is still borderline painful for me, and if I don’t wake up late enough, my day is usually not as productive as I would want it to be, if not outright ruined. Glad to see my impressions of this global early morning stupidity /s being validated somewhat.
In Spain you could select early morning or late classes in high School and in University. Late are usually there for the people that work.
I did chose sometimes early morning, sometimes late depending on my job or my preferences.
It made no difference at all. Just a different schedule. If you have early classes you need to sleep early.
I believe most people that never experience late classes are just idolizing, because what I see is most people get to bed late and that is the main problem that they have.
There is a tendency on humans beings of going to bed later, because everyday we can delay two hours going to bed but we can only change one hour ahead, so most people delay going to bed following friends on facebook or doing whatever they like. Just change your habits.
I guess I am an outlier here. I determined way-too-late in my college career that the (my) recipe for success was to attend lectures between 8:00AM and 1:00PM. Anything later than that and I would either fall asleep or could not concentrate. The best output of those afternoon lectures was transcribing whatever the professor said into my notebook. Which is nearly useless for mathematics-driven engineering classes, at least in my experience.
But for the early and mid-morning classes, my brain was sharp. I could listen and watch the professor then copy only the key points and equations. My retention and understanding of the material became SOOO much better. And, as a bonus, the morning classes were poorly attended, meaning additional face time with the professor.
One big problem is societies opinion that getting up early is considered good and getting up later in the day is bad, completely ignoring the different circadian rhythms of people and especially adolescents...
Counterexample: Started going to bed at a good time in college, gave me a reason to skip going out, and my brain performance unlocked into better focus, learning, and memory. Bonus was the classes were smaller.
Kind of odd that anyone thinks you need a study to confirm that if you go to sleep at between midnight and two in the morning (which seems to be the norm in this dataset although it's not very explicitly stated or easy to interpret), then having to be cognitively active at eight in the morning is going to be difficult.
If you think university is about learning, starting at midday is an easy win and it’s kind of baffling that administrators everywhere are sleeping on it. If you think university is about earning Reasonably Conscientious Employee accreditation, starting at midday would miss the whole point.
Anecdotally, I remember taking an early morning marksmanship (shooting) class in college. Students had no trouble getting up early for this and the class had near-perfect attendance throughout the semester. Biology, on the other hand, was another matter.
I really can't stress enough how important a good night's sleep is. I've struggled with insomnia for years and am only now getting it under control thanks to meditation, relaxation exercises, etc... These two books [1, 2] were the starting point for getting me back on track to falling asleep faster and staying asleep longer (especially important now with a small baby)
When I was an undergraduate student (1996-2001), I avoided the early classes like the plague. Ever seen frozen grease on a frying pan that was put out of the window on a freezing day? That is how my brain felt (and often still feels) in the morning.
The funny thing is, the reason why the university held early classes was "low capacity of amenities". E.g. not enough classrooms. Very understandable in early post-Communist Czechia where there was "low capacity" of everything.
But if American universities with their high tuition suffer from the same problem ... uh, is it caused by parasitic growth of bureaucracy that sucks all the money out of the actual educational part of the system? E.g. your tuition feeds thirty vice-probosts for Absolutely Necessary Stuff, but not enough teaching staff to have classes at a more reasonable hour?
BTW I am very sure that the vice-probosts for Yet Another Absolutely Essential Bullshit don't start their workday at dawn.
Many students may be forced to make one of two undesirable choices when faced with early class start times: sleep longer instead of attending class or wake up earlier to attend class.
There is a third option - go to bed earlier. Farmers have been doing it for millenia. Which raises an interesting question - are early classes at agricultural schools well-attended and do those students experience these same problems?
Our (computer) computer networking class started 07.00, and finished up 11.00 - it should have been split into two 2 hour sessions over the week, but due to scheduling conflicts we had to go for one 4 hour session.
Class attendance was nonexistent after the first two weeks. Grades were abysmal.
But to be fair, it was a horribly boring class as it was thought. Just hours of going through various communication protocols, that early in the morning?
It absolutely shocks me that anyone is surprised by this. School and work are much the same. Rigid schedules that disregard people's actual circadian rhythms blight lives.
Another example:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00375-z
It may sound silly, but isn't it time night owls advocated for themselves?
Thank goodness I went to a traditional uni. in the UK in the mid 70s. In the physics department there were no classes, only lectures and tutorials. Lectures were optional. and the class of your degree depended only on the finals and final year dissertation/project report.
We were able to arrange our own working patterns and were responsible enough to do it.
And that’s just the staff; imagine how the students feel.
Going back a bit in my career, I've looked at (real, raw) data on this topic in a different way and come up with a conflicting conclusion on the academic performance side.
Students taking the same course appear to perform significantly better when they take that course <= 9:00am. This trend is stronger the more students take the course. The difference tends to be on the order of the difference between, say, a B and a B-. (and I also chose specific courses where students are likely to have a variety of choices). I found that it tended to be the better students who self-selected into taking earlier courses, IIRC.
The authors add confounding factors when they structure the question as "# of early courses taken" and compare it to overall GPA. For example students who are able to take later classes tend to be Juniors & Seniors, and they may have different GPA's for other reasons-- program retention requirements for example often have higher requirements than for freshmen/sophomores. Students also have different constraints if the have a job, or commute and live further away.
Again, I'm only commenting on the academic performance side of the conclusions, not attendance or the other (interesting!) areas the study covered. My guess is that if the study's authors controlled for variables like student class standing, employment, age, and other factors their results might be weakened a bit. Or it could be that their results don't apply uniformly outside their own school (Though mine came from a school that was substantially similar in terms of market niche)
One thing to always note in these studies, particularly at the college level, is whether students were randomly-assigned to different sections. (I glanced at the study and couldn't confirm that this was how it was done, although they do reference studies that show similar results for random assignment.)
The reason is that registration at universities has become akin to airline boarding, comprising a complex schedule of priorities allowing certain privileged groups to register first—students in various honors programs, students enrolled in the same major as the course, athletes, and so on. As a result, more desirable class times (or instructors) will frequently be populated with more successful or well-prepared students compared with unfavorable times. (And 8AM is about as unfavorable as it gets.)
Whether or not registration prioritization makes any logical sense or serves any objectives other than making some students feel special is another question. (It's certainly not optimized around minimizing time to degree. Because why would we care about that? /s) And clearly it can have the effect of putting students who are already at risk into schedules that place them more at risk. But the effects of non-random assignment can also pollute studies like this.
Why we're holding classes at 8AM at all is another great question. You'd be tempted to answer "because space", but you might be surprised to find that many large classrooms are idled as early as mid-afternoon. Students seem to also dislike afternoon courses, but I suspect that faculty preferences are more the reason that those time slots don't get used.
I don't buy this. This is too much "exactly what a public click baity audience would like to read". Even if the research is real, dig with honesty and this is nonsense. Just drop the "University class" angle and this is obvious and not at all worth serious consideration, because it is obviously true not just for university courses, but life in general.
This conversation has been going on for years in regards to public schools ... I wonder how long until this comes into the workplace, and I'm forced to work 11am to 7pm, or Noon to 8pm, because my co-workers can't manage their own sleep schedules (something we, as civilized people, have done for 1000s of years, with great success)
I had an 8:15am or 9:00am class and I was struggling to get enough sleep. In the middle I told the instructor that I was going to skip lectures so I could sleep better. He didn't like that idea. I went ahead with my plan and used Khan Academy to get the material. My grade increased in the second half of the course.
How is morning class the variable as opposed to partying, playing video game, staying up too late, working late, etc?
I didn’t like 8AM classes but I took them to force myself to get to school early so I could get a parking spot. Then I camped there until my classwork was done.
It worked for me but I think I would have performed better with later classes. 10AM classes are probably the best. Not too close to lunch, not too early.
I live on the west coast, and work for people on Central time. I regularly take my first meeting of the day having just rolled out of bed. There is a 7AM weekly all-hands meeting that I simply don't attend most of the time, because it's usually pretty light on information and my productivity will tank for the day if I cut my sleep short to make it.
I recently travelled while working; through the Eastern and Atlantic timezones. It was hilarious how much more effective I felt. I was fully awake for morning meetings and had several hours for focused work each day where no one could bother me. People who work in the "ahead" timezones truly have a slight advantage in the corporate world, IMO. Makes me wish I worked for a company on Hawaii time TBH.
I love to fish, especially in tournaments. That means getting up at 3am to drive to the lake to blast off at sunrise. I do not like to wake up early, and do not do well anxiety wise the night before I have to wake up early for something. I tend not to sleep very well.
But damn do those days feel great.
I don't really notice til 3-4pm, then my brain basically shuts off.
Otherwise, I am trying to find the 'productivity sweet spot' for me these days. I have found, for me, it ramps throughout the day until I hit the zone, around 3-4pm. I can stay here until 9-10pm easily, if I can avoid the outside distractions of life.
The rest of the day I can learn pretty well. I spend most of my waking time reading and absorbing information. I don't feel inhibited from doing so really any time.
I have a feeling that a lot of this is due to a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' type problem. Generally high performing students (or more senior ones) get first dibs on classes, who will generally take the later classes. Thus lower performing students get the early classes.
The 8am class I had in my sophomore year of college was the only C I had. The professor who taught that class thought I was one of those low performers because I did so badly in his class.
Later he became undergrad chair. I needed to retrieve my class rank for grad school applications, and the request went to him. He rummaged through the files in my presence. When he found mine, he said “it’s impossible”. I was 4th in class in a cohort of about 50.
I was a decent student but I always underperformed at 8am.
(I’m much older now and I’ve been keeping normal hours for decades since. I’m ok at 8am now. I still hate early morning 7am meetings with Asia however — I’m in pacific time.)
Failed calculus one in my first year, mostly because it was at 7am. I'd make it to class and then promptly fall asleep during the lecture. I didn't register for anything earlier then 9am after that, things got better from there.
We had a paper that had one 8am lecture a week. Without fail we went through questions that would later be in the exam. The same numbers and everything. Of the 50 or so in the class under 10 showed up to that 8am session.
An alternative take. I’m an insomniac that tries to get to sleep before midnight, but usually has 2-3hrs awake in between sleep and time to wake up. Sometimes I wish I could pretend I was in a different timezone.
WHY is human civilization still geared towards working in the daytime??
When was the last time any of us did anything that REALLY needed sunlight?
Except farmers and maybe construction workers. This makes even less sense in hot climates, where they spend an asston of energy to cool themselves while insisting on working over the afternoon.
Honestly, why can't we nudge the working hours up a bit in the day so that everyone starts their job after noon, and comes home at night, with a few hours of free time before and after sleep.
Elect me and I will abolish getting up in the morning.
I would agree with this - classes before 9 am seem unnecessary. I would also argue that theres a moral hazard too pushing the start time back which means that this enables people to stay up later.
All these comments about people struggling with 8am classes. From 18-19 I had air traffic control training, on the job after our initial schoolhouse, at 545am. You learn to adjust or fail.
The problem I had with early classes and even today - If I have in my mind I have to get up 7am or 6am for some event I know my window of error for a good night sleep is tiny: -Having trouble falling asleep that night? -Wake up in the middle night to pee but cant get back to sleep for an hour or two? - Wake up 1 or 1.5 hours before your alarm?
If i know i have time to buffer against interruptions, I sleep better. If i know my window of error is tiny, Im doomed to poor sleep regardless.
I received a D minus in two classes my first semester. I thought I was fully prepared for college (and I was if i had been at home and I didn’t have anyone next door to play James Bond on N64 while drinking beers and ordering pizza).
I can totally see this being a problem and it happens more often with 200+ people seminars for freshmen. Best advice I can give you and didn’t realize until I was about to graduate is that you can retake a class and replace the grade.
Is there any reason to believe that shifting everything later won't also shift whatever people do in the evening to make it come out as a net wash?
I had 8 AM classes last quarter, and my experience with attendance correlates with the study. Poor attendance by the students and droopy eyes in class, though most did well in the course. (Maybe I need to make the material more challenging! :) )
But I'm going to try not to start before 10 AM from now on, though I'm a 6-6:30 AM riser. The 10 AM to 2 PM timeslot seems to cover the most people.
Schools in my part of California have been starting later. The kids are just as tired at early classes, they're staying up later.
Let me be the first to call this what it is - a strongly written opinion piece.
It's a lifestyle choice - if you go to sleep at 11pm of course 8am classess will make you detest them will have no concentration. Especially true if you use your phone up until you fall asleep. I was a student until recently and can say most of the burden is unfortunately on us. From my experience students lock themself in their room listen to music/play games/scroll social media until midnight. Instead of building a community where hanging out/studying with other students until lets say 8pm and then going to sleep would be the best for most students. When hanging out in groups you are filling our your need for socializing and more likely to regulate each other. When everyone is siloed in their own room you are more likely to see extreme disregulation like going to sleep at 1/2am on most days.
Not everyone is a morning person I will concede that much. But being a morning person, there is NOTHING that makes a day more cursed for me than waking up at 9AM when the sun is already up and most people are out and about.
In my opinion, what students (and all of us) need is universal digital hygene. A set of guidelines where we would finally be able to follow if we ever fall into disregulation. Not advocating for China style timeout lockdowns of your netflix/games, just a general set of guidelines so that if you stay up until 23pm /1am - it's your responsibility. Just like it's your responsibility to not regulate every other aspect of your life. You should be encouraged to be an adult.
is there a theory on why those inclinations exist? why would someone strongly prefer to wake up at 6am versus someone else at 10am - but "prefer" not as "I'd like that better" but as "it's impossible for me to adjust to it without mental and physical harm"? as far as my observations go it's not really a hard wired neurological fact but rather a result of psychological resistance and self-reinforcing circumstances:
I don't like my job -> don't want to go to bed yet (need to do sth I enjoy and also b/c I want to artificially stretch time until having to work again) -> I don't want to get out of bed (because I don't like my job and I also happen to sabotage my sleep by avoiding it at night and hence I didn't sleep enough) -> apparently I'm an owl ...
one question would be ... are there owls who enjoy whatever forces them to get out of bed early?
I also met my best friend in college thanks to ridiculously early morning classes.
Had an 8AM class freshman year. Guy in front of me would always fall asleep during class, so I'd kick his chair to wake him up.
Honestly I mostly did it because I felt bad for the prof. There were only 15-20 of us in the class and it was quite obvious when one person dozed off.
I had a professor in undergrad who scheduled his classes as early as possible, around 7:30am, because he was an early riser.
Notoriously known for difficult assignments and exams, he would allow extra time for tests, if we showed up an extra half hour early. Who wants to take an exam at 7am?! There was a massive curve to everyone’s grades.
K-12 start hours are one of the reasons I pulled my kids out of public school. We did a combination of homeschooling and a private school that provided homeschooling assistance three days a week from 10:00 am until 2:00 pm. My kids did much better academically once we eliminated the 6:00 am wake up times.
One easy way to flip your schedule is to stop eating 12-14 hours before you want to wake up. This is also great for when you are traveling timezones.
For example, stop eating at 4pm, and you'll more easily wake up at 6am the next day. Do this for a couple days and you'll find yourself on the flipped the scheduled.
I think this is more a function of college students enjoying staying up late for social reasons/the psychological feeling of independence. High school students tend to stay up later than their families as well, and after your family goes to bed you have more space to be your own person.
Personal anecdote. I remember dragging myself to measure theory classes at 8am and constantly struggling with the material, even if I'd had a good night's sleep. After a few weeks I called quits on this insanity and switched to self-study, breezing through the course.
I heard in a Paul Chek podcast that morning/night preferences have a genetic component. You may not be able to alter it by choice.
He also mentioned that living away from the timezone you were born in can also cause sleep issues, based on his experiences with clients he has coached.
'Early afternoon classes linked to poor middle aged professor delivery.'
I was an extreme night owl down to my late 20's. Having kids forced me to change. It took 7 years. Since my 40's, have me teach an 8am class and it will be 3x as goed as a 2pm.
This is unsurprising. In college I had a 7:35 anatomy lecture in the winter semester in the US Northeast. How many students do you think were making it to a 7:35 lecture in 20 below 0 temperature before snow had been plowed, before busses were running, and with wind blowing in their faces? It was poorly thought through.
Anyone who is interested in this more should check out Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The book isn’t perfect, but it does discuss how we systematically harm our children by the timing of our school days. For example, teenagers need more sleep than younger children, but we have the teenagers up the earliest for school because they ought to be “responsible”. This reflects in their lack of classroom engagement and progress and test scores. IMO, if we want to consider our public education system an actual service to our youth, we should be doing what we can to meet their needs, rather than imposing our virtues and opinions on them.
I strongly prefer to get all of my activities out of the way as early as possible. I have ADHD and a looming afternoon activity locks me into place and I cannot be productive until that afternoon activity is set to start. Its a curse.
As an early bird and someone who rarely goes to bed before 11pm, I had the opposite experience. I think there's a middle ground here. There's no reason for a class, work, or anything to start before 9am, or after 4pm.
How many remain these days? My impression is that when my son went through college (2007-2011) he had no difficulty leaving his mornings clear. But I wasn't a helicopter parent, and have limited information there.
Let me fix the title
"Early morning university classes linked to poor sleep and academic performance, blurry eyed researcher says"
What were the motives for this research, I wonder? And who clung on?
Let me guess... those who can't get up at 5am.
I prefer to wake up to the sunrise. I have to be to work at 6am though, so it doesn't happen as often as I'd like. It just seems weird to get up before the sun; I have no motivation.
FWIW, I'm biologically NOT a night owl. Hate staying up late, am constantly bargaining with my wife to let me go to bed earlier, can't stand the idea of sleeping away the day.
Alternatively: "students who wait to the last-minute to register for their classes get stuck with the 8AM classes and perform worse than students who registered early."
funny thing for ADD people who use nootropics. My dopamine boost seems to fully show up at 8am if I take the nootropics at 5 am, that is even with the micro-dose of caffeine I do at 5 am and 1 pm. But since I pair caffeine and coffee-fruit with weak stimulants the peak seems to last about 8-12 hours.
Thus, I do my reflections at 5-8 am with my planning at end of day. My own nootropics mix seems to work better with a micro-dose of L-DOPA as I double up on MAO-B inhibitors.
Anecdote, but I've long thought my college GPA would've been as much as a half point higher if I never took a class that started before 9:30 AM.
I’m so happy that I just skipped any classes that would start early during university. Some of these classes would start at 7:45 am. What a joke.
All those lazy kids who can't afford houses probably, don't they know they should stop acting so entitled and shift to being day people?
This is only because people like to wake up at the last second and are still groggy during class. If you have an 8am class don’t get up at 7:55am, get up at 6:30am. You may like it less but you’ll be awake for class and you’ll do better. I don’t know at what point we decided these kids have to have everything done exactly optimal for them with no deviance to make their life harder but it explains a lot about how incapable they are when they do encounter hardships. You may now remove yourself from my lawn.
The problem is going to bed late, not getting up early. Unfortunately, heavy course demands can keep a student up late into the night.
Hm, I wonder.. are they also linked to a lifetime of bad dreams about sleeping in and missing classes and being unprepared for tests.
Early morning classes are such a bad idea. Hopefully, this bad practice can change in the future.
In other news: the sky is blue, and the sun rose from the east this morning
Or people partying… bet that as a higher link to poor performance and
Yeah those 8am classes means a very bad day for people. I remember
Really? I had to check to see if this was an Onion article or not.
8 am calc class my freshman year, can confirm
ah yes, yet another article from the prominent journal Nature Obvious Results
Water is wet
Upvoting on principle.
The discussions under this article makes me irrationally angry. There’s a lot of people saying “just go to bed early” or “just wake up early”. Simple solution, isn’t it? Except it’s not. This belief by both night owls and morning types is affecting a lot of people and their health. Circadian rhythm is different for differently people. Sleep chronotypes are somewhat well researched and there’s clear indication that a good percentage of people are in one extreme or the other and the a big chunk in the middle. It’s also important to note that this shifts with age.
There’s also evolutionary bias for why natural selection would have favoured staggered sleep schedules - in a group setting this would have allowed different people to stay alert at different times during the night and thereby increasing the chances of survival of the entire group.
Irrespective of all of this - it fucking doesn’t matter. If some people say they struggle to get up early and are sincere about it, it makes sense to provide very basic accommodations. For example, what’s the harm in having meetings only after 9pm? Also don’t schedule meetings after 3pm so those who are the morning types can wind down and get home? We make all sorts of reasonable accommodations for food preferences, religious beliefs, …etc. If some people are more productive during certain hours, it fucking makes good business sense to let them work during their best hours - within reasonable limits.
I can only recommend people to read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker for the health and economic damage we do this society in the name of perfect adherence.
(I have an ADHD diagnosis but looking at the effects of poor sleep sometimes I wonder if I really have ADHD or if it’s just the poor sleep that’s been fucking with me all my life)
[dead]
That’s ridiculous. This is like saying that your job is linked to poor sleep and performance.
Plan and prioritize.
If it’s too much, you are either over loaded or out having fun at night. Either way, decrease the work load.
Theories like this one from Nature does more harm than good, by placing blame on the school or hours rather than the students lifestyle or choices.
Snowflakes creating more snowflakes.
It was painfully obvious that nearly nobody wanted to take 8:00 AM classes when I was in college. There were two friends of mine who took the same 8:00 AM math class one semester, and they never met in lecture, except on quiz days.
Even the early birds I knew didn't quite like the morning classes, because they then had to rush towards lecture halls first thing in the morning, rather than strolling leisurely to the library, eating breakfast, or jogging and taking a shower, which I suspect is what many early birds most enjoy about being an early bird.
The problem is that there are seminars and stuff that occur at at like 7 or 8 pm, so university life almost necessarily extends late (after lecture, dinner, assignments, projects) in the evening at least on some days. This is further exacerbated by the fact that given how many group assignments there are, individual student rarely have total control over their own schedule. Even if you carefully choose your classes, avoid all late-night sessions, don't party, plan your life, it's still incredibly hard to sleep before 11pm consistently.