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Here’s What Happens to Night Owls at Work, According to Science
Bill Murphy Jr.
5–6 minutes

I’m a night owl. There, I said it — and not for the first time in Inc.com columns. But I recently came across a new study that talks about what often happens to night owls (more scientifically, evening chronotypes) in terms of their careers, and it made me take notice.

Writing in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, Tapio Räihä of the University of Oulu in Finland and his coauthors set out to determine whether morning people or night owls (morning or evening chronotypes) are more likely to wind up filing for workplace disability over the course of their careers.

Räihä, a physician who specializes in occupational healthcare, isn’t a night owl himself.

“I’m intermediate. So I think I’m in a bit more lucky situation,” he told me. He added later: “Evening chronotypes are prone to get these health issues. And a big reason behind that is that their internal rhythm doesn’t match the society’s schedules.”

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The researchers followed 5,679 members of the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 from 46 to age 57, between 2012 and 2023.

“We looked at the first new disability pension that was granted for people who were not previously on disability pension,” Räihä said. “We did a 12-year follow-up of those 5,000 plus people and compared the relative incidence of a new disability, first new disability pension between evening chronotypes and morning chronotypes.”

What did they find?

“The relative hazard of receiving a new disability pension is about 70% higher among evening types compared to morning types. And, this is the crude model, when nothing else is taken into account,” he said.

Among the evening types, 8.3 percent of men and 12.1 percent of women received a disability pension during the follow-up. That compared with 5 percent of men and 7.2 percent of women among the morning types.

“Adjusting for socioeconomic factors did not diminish these results,” Räihä said. He added: “For example, education on average in Finland, evening chronotypes have higher education than morning chronotypes. So you would think that they have a lower risk for disability pensions. But that was not the case in our study.”

The authors wrote that the higher rate among evening types “represents a major challenge for sustainable national economies.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time people have studied something close to this.

In one study, researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet studied 27,500 middle-aged and older adults from the UK Biobank. “People with poor sleep had brains that appeared on average one year older than their actual age.”
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands tracked the sleep habits and health outcomes of nearly 24,000 people over 10 full years. People who habitually stay up late wound up with faster cognitive decline than those who go to bed early. But, there was an unexpected twist. The less education night owls had, the less likely they were to experience similar levels of cognitive decline over the study period.
Simon Evans of the University of Surrey studied the sleep habits of 546 university students. Sure enough, they found a correlation between people with “evening chronotypes” – basically, night owls – and lower sleep quality, higher levels of depression, higher alcohol use, and lower mindfulness.
Stanford University researchers surveyed 73,880 adults. Regardless of preference, people who stayed up late at night had higher rates of behavioral and mental disorders than those who did not.

Still, I’m living proof that it’s hard for an evening person to become a morning person.

Now, I do work for myself, so I have some flexibility, I suppose. But then life intervenes. I have a daughter whose school doesn’t accommodate my desire to stay up till two and get up at nine every day. I have to get her there in the morning.

So what’s to be done?

“There are morning chronotypes, intermediate types and evening types,” Räihä said. “And much of it is genetic, like 50% comes from your genes. So an evening person cannot change into a morning person. But there is some flexibility there because the other 50% is not dictated by genes.”

“You are more prone to, for example, sleep debt,” he added. “Sleeping too little can cause changes in your hormones and your appetite and stuff like that”

And most can’t simply avoid the morning. “In our study, about 70 percent of the evening chronotypes who were working were working in day jobs,” he said.

His best advice?

“From the point of view of preventing disability pensions, it is definitely a good thing if you love your job and love what you’re doing,” Räihä said. “And if you have other options besides your job you don’t love, I think you should find out about those options.”

It makes sense, but I’ll have to sleep on it.

Earlier than normal, if possible.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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