While listening to the cacophony of jackhammers as the city installs sewers on my street[1], futilely attempting to finish a sentence amidst the pounding outside my house, I’m reminded why I prefer the night.
It’s the stillness of a room, knowing everyone in the house has succumbed to a deep slumber, and the only noises are the cat’s padded footsteps and the gentle rhythm of keystrokes.
It’s the immersion in silence, what the poet William Wordsworth called “the bliss of solitude.” It’s the absence of daylight with only the dim illuminations of things celestial in the sky.
Or something like that.
You see, I’m naturally a night owl, meaning my body clock—or circadian rhythms—are set for me to operate at my peak late at night, and to sleep through the mornings. While the research is somewhat disparate, researchers believe that roughly 30 percent of the population are night owls[2].
Like many night owls, I’m forced to adjust to a work schedule that’s unnatural for me. I teach high school, which requires that I wake at the ass-crack of dawn Monday through Friday to be at work for 7 a.m.[3]
During the summers, however, my biological clock resets, and I’m up until 3 a.m. each night, howling at the moon, and I’ll sleep—unless I have to attend to morning responsibilities—until close to noon.
But here’s the problem. There’s also a societal stigma attached to nocturnal people[4]. To this day, we still live with numerous Puritanical hangovers in our culture, and many people believe that anyone who isn’t up early—ready to feed the chickens and plough the land—is inherently lazy.
There’s also the association made with nightlife and decadent behaviors. If a person is staying up late, it seems to reason they must be jacked up on stimulants, raging in a hotel room with Motley Crue and their groupies.
This, of course, is a pernicious myth.
While there are some health risks that can be attributed to nocturnal schedules—night owls tend to be more at risk for heart disease, obesity and some mental illnesses—there is nothing that suggests we are lazy or depraved.
Night owls are just programmed differently and should not be subjected to stigmatization. In fact, in the modern world—especially after the pandemic taught us that work schedules are somewhat arbitrary—we should acknowledge that the concept of rising early is antiquated and not synonymous with hard work.
Perhaps, as a society, we should be more flexible when it comes to scheduling and accepting of any individual differences, no matter what form they take.
In the meantime, for the next two months, I’m going to embrace my nights and soak in the silence as I write.
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[1] Eventually, I accepted that there was nothing I could do to stop the construction noise, so I became a refugee, seeking out a quiet café in which to work.
[2] Most of the population prefers to sleep between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. Of course, we also know that circadian rhythms are affected by other factors, such as age. For example, as I get older, sleeping until noon is a rarity.
[3] I’ve frequently noted the absurdity of school schedules, seeing most adolescents are biologically programmed to stay up during the nights and sleep later into the mornings; therefore, most high school students are half-asleep until roughly 9 a.m., retaining only a fraction of the information that is being presented in their early morning classes.
[4] It can be argued that societal stigmas are placed on anyone who deviates from the norm.
