Morning People vs Night People

I’m that annoying morning person who pops out of bed, ready to take on the day. My husband needs to hit the snooze button over and over again until I literally pull him out of bed. I’m happy, he’s groggy. The day becomes night and we reverse. I need to go to bed early while he’s just gearing up. I’m groggy, he’s happy.

I got a new fitness tracker recently that tracks sleep. I started noticing a pattern in the results. My deep sleep is soon after I fall asleep. Note that deep sleep is apparently where the body recovers whereas REM sleep is where the brain recovers. I imagine light sleep is somewhere in between.

First off, don’t laugh that I went to bed last night at 8:04 pm. I’d blame it on getting older but honestly, my mom used to chide me that I often came home BEFORE curfew in high school. What can I say? I like to sleep!

I then had my husband track his sleep patterns. My theory was that his deep sleep must be closer to when he wakes up because it can be near impossible to get him out of bed at times. Please note that he has a different fitness tracker and seems to only measure deep and light sleep patterns.

Based on his results, it would seem that his deep sleep is in the earlier morning hours vs soon after he goes to bed.

We tracked our patterns over several days and this trend was consistent for us both – deep for me soon after falling asleep and deep for him just before waking up.

Obviously this is a ridiculously small sample size and we’re using 2 different trackers. With that caveat in mind, it seems plausible (at least in our household) that morning people might sleep deeper initially after going to bed whereas night people sleep deeper right before waking up.

At least we can both be more sympathetic to each other’s plight now that we have sleep data to back our behavior. For example, I can perhaps try to modify my approach to be a little more subtle in the mornings vs turning all the lights on, singing loudly, jumping on the bed. Who am I kidding? He and I both know I’ll continue to be annoying in the morning. And I think he likes that I crash hard early so he can play his video games into the wee hours of the morning. Seems to work for us.

Sweet dreams!