The Morning Myth

CHAPTER 10 Night Owls Are More Creative: Creativity Flourishes After the Early Birds Have Crashed

Birds. Crashing. Sorry, but that was just too easy! However, it’s true: As you’ve already learned, morning people experience fewer productive hours each day, because they eventually crash while night owls keep going and going like the Energizer Bunny.

Early risers crash—both literally and figuratively. And the limited amount of useful hours they enjoy each day, versus the much greater amount enjoyed by night owls, also stifles their creativity.

In other words, if you want any sort of creative project done right, give it to a night owl. Or, wait … what you’ll actually find is that highly creative people are night owls.

Seriously, who ever heard of a rock star getting up at five o’clock in the morning to work on that new song? Or the artist who set her alarm clock for four o’clock to “get ahead of the world” and work on that painting while everyone else is still sleeping?

Don’t get me wrong: You will find those types of people working at those hours; however, it’s because they never went to bed in the first place, not because they got up at some crazy early hour to get the job done.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I can wake up anywhere from 7:00 a.m. (rare) to 8:30 a.m. (my usual time) to as late as 11:00 a.m. (again rare). However, regardless of the fact that I happen to get up at 7:00 a.m. on some rare days—and when I was overdoing my thyroid medication, I was jumping out of bed ...