SFH #166: Optimizing Your Chronotype

Take the quiz and see how to optimize your day 🧐

Using your body clock may optimize your health. In particular, following our sleep patterns (your natural rhythm) is one way to take advantage of getting the most bang for our activity buck. 

Countless reports promise us early bird nirvana following in the footsteps of successful entrepreneurs, world leaders, and the best professional athletes. It's as if we'd become super productive, super healthy machines if we just woke up at 5:00 am. How's that sound? 😕

Look, I love waking up early. I've been getting up early most of my life except for a few patches here and there. My ideal sleep window is 9-10 bedtime and 6-7 wake-up. However, the realistic picture of what we can do with our health and wake time is learning our natural patterns and matching our activities and routines. So here's what you want to know and how to get the most out of it.

A couple of different chronotype versions are floating out there in the scientific world, though the most modern are bear, lion, dolphin, and wolf. These come from Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., a sleep doctor and chronobiologist guiding stars like Oprah to their best patterns. For a fun exercise, I recommend taking his quiz here and watching the video that will follow for your particular type. I was a bit skeptical, though he did an admirable job of addressing some swirling questions, like ‘aren't we a mix?’

At the end of the day, I think this information can be valuable from a testing standpoint. And to make it even more simple and fun 😉, if you want to see where you may land and skip the video, I'm sharing this helpful infographic on the different types.