SIO336: How Night People Suffer in a Morning Person World

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 336. I'm Thomas. That's Lindsey. How you doing?

0:00:19 Lindsey: Fantastic. How are you?

0:00:21 Thomas: Doing better. And this time I won't regale you with hours of talk of Arlo waking up too early. He's gotten slightly better.

0:00:23 Lindsey: Yeah? Oh. Interesting.

0:00:31 Thomas: Yeah, well, it's hit and miss. It's gotten to the point where like some days it's okay, but other days it is not. It's like 50-50 now instead of every single morning. So that's nice. I know it's

0:00:41 Lindsey: Well, it's been a few years since we recorded part one, so I'm guessing it's an age effect, you know?

0:00:46 Thomas: Been it's been a minute, yeah, no, still, still solidly a morning dude, but it's just a question of whether we can get him to occupy himself during the morning, but yeah, I'm excited for this part two. I think the last cliffhanger we left on was, I'm curious if one might be able to effectively use melatonin to regulate sleep. I know that you know people do that for jet lag, people do that to try to like reset their sleep, and then I saw a headline recently that was something about like it being really bad for kids, so I, it's related to this whole thing, give us a melatonin, uh, explainer. Hmm.

0:00:55 Lindsey: Yeah. Mm -hmm.

0:01:20 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. So with the caveat that I have never delivered a baby and I'm not a real doctor, my understanding prior to actually going and looking at stuff was that melatonin does in fact work, and that is still my impression from looking at recent meta-analyses and stuff. So yeah, so there's lots of research demonstrating its efficacy in reducing jet lag, as you just said, treating sleep onset insomnia, improving sleep quality in a number of different types of populations. And that goes for both adults and kids. So that's a thing. In terms of, so it is efficacious, right?

I mean, like in other countries it's actually medicine that you get a prescription for, it's yeah, so the U.S. is kind of behind the times in terms of this still being an over-the-counter, um, supplement which is part, part of the problem that we'll come back to in just a second. So it, it does work for those things. And in in terms of safety, there was actually a review that was published in just 2021 about that. Review looking at the serious adverse events in studies that specifically have used very high doses of melatonin to sort of see like if it's well tolerated even at high doses. And this is an adult sample, by the way, so there's that. But that review suggested that even in significant doses, melatonin is pretty well tolerrated. Like there were not any records of significant adverse events

0:01:35 Thomas: Right oh okay yeah that's good, and again, as you say, don't take medical medical advice from a podcast we're not liable for any melatonin overdoses. Oh.

0:02:47 Lindsey: In that review. Correct. Correct. No. But yeah, it is apparently well -tolerated even in high doses, according to this, right? So it actually was interesting. So apparently the reason that they published that review last year was because, and I don't know if you'd heard of this, but I had not, they were evaluating it at least at one point as a potential treatment and preventative for COVID. It and so I it's it's apparently an antioxidant so they thought it might I yeah and and I don't have a really good sense I didn't have time to look into this piece of it very much so I don'T HAVE A VERY GOOD SENSE OF LIKE HOW STRONG THE EVIDENCE IS THAT IT ACTUALLY WORKS BUT THERE'S STILL THINGS BEING PUBLISHED ON IT NOW SO YEAH

0:03:15 Thomas: Why would that work? Why?

0:03:32 Thomas: Didn't they go okay, okay, why didn't the idiots go with that one? That would have been, you know, because they latched onto the like, they're hiding the real thing. Melatonin actually cures whatever. And then they could have all overdosed on that and been asleep and we wouldn't have to hear them. That would be nice. Why did they, instead they just pick the horse dewormer. Weird how these things go.

0:03:46 Lindsey: EXACTLY YEAH I know, it's terrible. Um, so so so that was why they published the review, because calls to poison control increased by like 70% % after this was in the headlines or whatever, which is interesting because I didn't even hear about it. Adults, safe, right? For adults, even in high doses. And there was a study or a paper that came out in 2020 on the efficacy and safety of melatonin for sleep onset insomnia in children and adolescents.

And so this was a meta -analysis that they did of randomized controlled trials. And the evidence there, too, suggests that melatonin is well tolerated in children and adolescents and is effective for the short term treatment of sleep onset insomnia. But so one caveat that I think is maybe what you were reading about, you can tell me if I'm wrong, is a paper and it was a response to an analysis that had been done of melatonin in Canada. Right.

Essentially, the crux of this paper is looking at the poor quality control of over -the -counter melatonin. So again, like in the UK and Australia and many other countries, melatonin is just medicine, you get a prescription. But in the US currently, and in Canada up until a few years ago, we can just buy it over the counter, right? Right. And as folks are probably aware, the downside of that is that over -the -counter supplements are not regulated by the FDA.

0:05:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:07 Lindsey: So the actual content of what you get in melatonin supplements and any supplements bigger than melatonin can vary really widely. So yeah. So this study that this response I read was talking about, this study analyzed products purchased from grocery stores and pharmacies in Canada and found that the actual melatonine content of products varied from between 83% % less to what was on the label to nearly 500% % more Melatonin that was on the label. So yeah, like if it says you're getting five milligrams, it's actually 25 milligrams or up to that, or maybe as little as. Yeah, yeah.

0:05:36 Thomas: Holy moly. That's nuts. So the fact that this was in the supplement section actually for me was why I didn't think it was real. You know, which was just, you know, that's kind of a cognitive error on my part, like it doesn't doesn't necessarily follow, but because yeah like everything in there is fake, so you know, odds are, so I was like, oh, it must be fake if it's available there. And if had I lived in Europe, where it's like you get a prescription for it, I'd be like, oh, okay, it must mean medicine then, yeah but this is, this is, I see things about this about other stuff, like protein powder will be one, we're like, yeah do you know, yeah, some protein powder, there's just arsenic in it. And I'm like, what?

0:05:52 Lindsey: Right. Right. Yeah, it's a decent heuristic.

0:06:09 Lindsey: It's medicine, yeah. Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:06:21 Thomas: There's just, apparently this is kind of a problem. Stuff just gets, adulterated oh, with certain stuff. And then if somebody dies, they do a recall, but if it's not enough to like kill anyone or nobody finds it, like, and occasionally I get that information, I'm like, I cannot live with that information. So, I will try to just forget it because I don't know. There's no way to know like what thing I'm having, but this is crazy with the melatonin. Is there any indication of like, once this was figured out, they stopped doing that or is this just current life?

0:06:31 Lindsey: Mm -huh. Yeah. Well, So, yeah, so this was an analysis of stuff in Canada, and it within some period after the study came out, Canada actually did make it prescription. I don't know if it was in response to that study.

0:07:00 Thomas: Oh, okay. What about for all of us refugees down here in this third world country called America that doesn't do things when things happen?

0:07:07 Lindsey: Oh yeah No, I so even though this study was not in the U.S., there have been other studies that have looked at supplements more broadly and done the same thing, to analyze them for content. And you may have heard of one there was, there was one that um, got a lot of press a few years ago, where they, um, they analyzed supplements from like one of the really big, like, store brands of supplements and found that a lotof them didn't contain any of the active ingredient that was advertised, right?

0:07:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:07:35 Lindsey: But the melatonin thing, like, the more concerning part of that is, is the idea that you might be getting dosages that are much higher, potentially Like that could. Yeah. So, you all of this would be fine if taking too much melatonin. Well, yeah, no, it wouldn't be.

0:07:41 Thomas: Yeah. I don't really think it's fine regardless. Like if you buy a thing and it gives you five times more of the thing, I don'T think that's ever fine.

0:07:54 Lindsey: But Yeah. No. Well, but it would be it would be like it wouldn't make me too nervous if taking too much. Melatonin is the same thing as taking too much of certain other things like I think vitamin C, if you take too much you just pee it out, right? Like I don'T I don't think you can really OD on vitamin C. Yeah, good good one.

0:08:03 Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah turns into vitamin P. Sorry. Am a dad, so I just have to get a few of those in there.

0:08:12 Lindsey: Yeah. So if that was the case with melatonin, then like, yeah, if you're getting too much, you're going too much whatever. But apparently, melatonin is a potent antigonadal hormone, which I did not know. So yes, yeah.

0:08:25 Thomas: Oh, anti -gonadal, huh? Is that what

0:08:28 Lindsey: So animal Models suggest that in doses even lower than would regularly be on the label for children to consume, melatonin can reduce gonad size and fertility in rodents, right? So this is mice, rats, enhancers that this has been shown in. As far as I know, there hasn't been a ton of research of the type that would be necessary to know if that's a significant risk for humans, but I think it's reasonable to think that it might be. There was one study published in 2018 that suggested possible delayed puberty among kids kids that started a melatonin regimen before puberty for chronic sleep issues. So it's maybe a potential risk there. Said, my understanding is that those kinds of problems are going to come about with long-term usage. So if your kid is having like temporary problems falling asleep, you administering melatonin for a night or two, I doubt is going to do anything. But like, I don't know, you now, like I

0:08:28 Thomas: It sounds like?

0:09:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:22 Lindsey: Think we tend to be pretty risk averse with our their kids. So, and you don't know what you're getting with the over -cater.

0:09:27 Thomas: So I'm going to not do melatonin for my kids, like go to Canada

0:09:29 Lindsey: Yeah. Or if you want to do melatonin, you should just get some when we go to, yeah. Or when we got to QED, we could, we could pop over for a jet lag prescription and then, yeah, have that leftover for later. So

0:09:33 Thomas: Ah oh yeah and then give me, they'd give me insurance and do a bunch of medical procedures that I need probably, right.

0:09:48 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I'm planning to get all kinds of care when we're over there. It'll be fun. But yeah, so I guess, like, I don't, I didn't want to catastrophize too much because I don't think the evidence is is super strong that like this is going to immediately kill your children, but like it's it's a non-zero risk, it sounds like, so I don't know. Um, most of that has to do with regulation more so than Yeah.

0:10:08 Thomas: Good safety. Tip. Okay. Oh.

0:10:10 Lindsey: Yeah, so should we get back to chronotype? Yeah.

0:10:14 Thomas: Yeah, let's get back to the man telling us we need to wake up early. Yeah, no.

0:10:19 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly, and all the problems it causes. It's the best. Um, so last time we talked about variability in preferences for sleep timing, also known as chronotype. And we laid out how circadian cycles are regulated, all that good stuff. People should listen to that if they haven't already. You know, the primary conclusion to note there is that people differ from one another in terms of when they prefer to sleep. And those differences are malleable. People can adjust their sleep schedules, but only partially, right?

Sleep-wake cycles are, for almost everyone, being constantly synchronized to external time cues, predominantly light. But there are heritable individual differences in things like endogenous circadian cycle length and light sensitivity and strength of melatonin response and so forth that change that process of synchronization. And that creates these individual differences. So this means that in response to the exact same environmental cues, two people can have very different responses in terms of their circadian rhythms. And that's what's captured by chronotype.

So the interesting thing about chronotype, which we previewed a little bit in part one, is that there's this really sizable literature literature, connecting it to different facets of health and well-being, both physical health and mental health. And I'll give you a rundown of some of those specifics in a few minutes. But generally speaking, evening types look a lot worse off in a variety of different domains than do morning types. Is that surprising to you at all? Or is that

0:11:38 Lindsey: Exactly what you predicted? Yeah, yeah, it's a bummer. So part is clear that there are all these negative associations with being an evening type. But what is not clear yet from the existing evidence is why evening chronotype is related to all of those negative outcomes. Please enlighten us.

0:11:54 Thomas: I'll tell you from us having to live in your world, all you morning people, it's terrible. I mean, we already know that just being tired, like, or you know, not getting enough sleep is associated with all kinds of bad outcomes, is is this? Well, I'll tell you what, was this controlled for? That Ah.

0:11:59 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Absolutely. Well, so that's where we're going, kind of, right?

0:12:15 Thomas: Okay but know, that's a big deal with a lot of the, like, structural racism type things, where it's, you know, there's so many overlapping issues, one of which is like, yeah, well, Black neighborhoods are closer to, like, like, you going it and all that, like, there's more noise on average because of like where the infrastructure was put because of structural racism. And that filters into like, well, that way, that means black children are not getting as much uninterrupted sleep, which then reduces, you know, their performance at school. And then it's a cycle. So all that stuff is to say that like not getting sleep sucks, and it wouldn't surprise me if, uh, is a component in why us night people are a little more miserable than all you other people. Yeah.

0:12:36 Lindsey: Mm -hmm. Yeah. I inclined to agree with you. That is my favorite hypothesis, and we're gonna see why in a little bit. But like, yeah, I think it's kind of funny that that isn't like a prominent question in some researchers' minds when they investigate this, because there are a bunch of studies of chronotype doing these associations where they don't control for these various sleep factors that I think are obviously important.

0:13:18 Thomas: Can there be one single scientist in the lab that's like a night person that's like, guys, you don't, you what are you talking, it's very simple, you see how I'm in a bathrobe in the lap right now and I'm miserable and I can't wake up, yeah, that's, and all you've been here since four, like, working happily with, yeah.

0:13:25 Lindsey: Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's because that person's irresponsible, though, and they don'T get to work in the lab anymore, more, as we're going to see. Yeah, it's a bummer. Yeah, so I mean, you fairness, there are three broad possibilities about why evening types might be more prone to various kinds of problems. So first of all, it is possible that physical and mental health problems affect chronotype. That is possible. You know, we know that depression and anxiety are related to chronotype, we also know that anxiety can impact sleep patterns. So maybe it is the case that the the experience of depression and anxiety sort of shift people's chronotype later.

And that's what's associated or that's what accounts for it. So that's possible. Second, it is possible that chronotype causes problems for physical and mental health. And that could either mean a direct cause. So meaning that like specifically when you prefer to go to sleep per se impacts health. Or it could be an indirect cause. Meaning that chronotype impacts health through its impact on some intervening variable like, as you mentioned, sleep quality I think is a pretty good candidate there. So it could it could absolutely be the case that there's nothing inherently unhealthy about sleeping from 2am to 10am instead of,

0:13:42 Thomas: True true right yeah

0:14:42 Lindsey: You know, 11pm to seven or whatever. But that because of the way that most people have to structure their lives, the preference to go to bed later creates these problems. I think that's very possible. And third, you knows, it's possible that there are some other variable or set of variables that happens to cause both late chronotype and physical and mental health problems. So we talked about the fact that chronotype is, you heritable. And it's possible that just weirdly, the genetic underpinnings of chronotype also predispose people to like mental and physical health problems under certain conditions. So that's possible. Or maybe it's that people who choose to lead unhealthy lifestyles are doing things that both cause them to stay up later and to have health problems. And some people seem very content with that explanation for what's going on.

0:14:51 Thomas: I mean, I guess that could explain a percentage of it, I don't know, like maybe it's just, yeah, someone who parties too much, and I can't, can't, and I actually should be going to bed early but just, you know, just the nightlife, I mean

0:15:31 Lindsey: Sure yeah, it could yeah that's entirely possible, right? And and like none of these are mutually exclusive explanations necessarily, if we're thinking about case-by-case sort of considerations. But well

0:15:49 Thomas: That's us when we go to a con, in fairness. Yeah.

0:15:53 Lindsey: Yeah, I mean, some of us, but like, I'd say that that's partially dependent on chronotype, wouldn't you, like, it did it, did, yes, that's true, we were all going to bed never I think was when, when we went to bed. Yeah, that was good times. Yeah. So anyway, so all of these are possibilities. There's not a definitive answer yet as to which of these causal possibilities accounts for these links to health yet, but there is some really interesting work to talk about, which we will. And I think I have what I think are some really interested things to talk to you about. Interesting observations about the recommendations that are often made to help people mitigate the risks associated with being an evening person, which largely are about how to be less of an an evening person. Has become like less of like the dominant recommendation in the past decade or two than it was prior to that. But it's still, it's

0:15:56 Thomas: Well it shifted all our chronotypes a little yeah I see

0:16:41 Lindsey: Still an issue, I think.

0:16:41 Thomas: So so we should go to conversion camps and see, yeah. If

0:16:44 Lindsey: Exactly. I mean, it kind of has that flavor.

0:16:46 Thomas: We can pray the lazy away. Damn.

0:16:48 Lindsey: It's that it seriously does have that flavor, there is like, some really weird moralizing over when people prefer to go to sleep. And I think that that can have really negative consequences. Chronotype chauvinism. That's, that's what this is, right? So just briefly, before we get into the health stuff, there was a really interesting study by Yam and colleagues that was published in 2014 on evaluations of employees as a function of employee start times and supervisor chronotype.

And it's important to note that this study is asking a question about the unintended consequence of flexible work practices or practices that are designed to minimize the extent to which work demands interfere with employees' abilities to meet other life demands, like childcare, for instance, right, if you have to drop the kids off at daycare before work. It'd be really nice if your work time was flexible enough for you to do that and not be late, right? Generally, flexible work practices have desirable outcomes like increasing employee satisfaction and stuff. But Yam and colleagues argued that certain practices like having flexible work start times can have unforeseen negative consequences like employees being judged for what time they choose to come to work. Even if,

0:17:02 Thomas: Right yeah once

0:17:55 Lindsey: Yeah, even if they they ultimately work the same hours and have the same level of productivity as their colleagues who come in earlier. So in their study, they recruited pairs of supervisors and employees to participate. So these were actual supervisors and employers. And they measured employees' work start times and supervisors' perceptions of employee conscientiousness and job performance and supervisors chronotype, as well as a number of important control variables. So they measured like demographic stuff about the employee and total number of hours that the employee worked, formal flexibility of work start time and a few other things, right, that could have been confounds. And then they evaluated whether employee start time controlling for all of those other things affected supervisors' evaluations of them. And it did. So even controlling for all of these characteristics, you know, total work time and so on, supervisors perceived employees with later start times as less conscientious, and that perception of them as less conscientious translated into lower evaluations of their job performance, right? And, and, more interestingly, this effect depended on supervisor chronotype. So night

0:17:54 Thomas: Again yeah ah yes, oh.

0:19:03 Lindsey: Owl supervisors did not judge conscientiousness on the basis of start time. It was only morning people supervisors who saw...

0:19:10 Thomas: So they were, you know, is there a correlation of nighttime, uh, chronotype people being more rational, because yeah

0:19:15 Lindsey: Actually, we're going to get to that. It's like the one thing that's kind of positive.

0:19:17 Thomas: They did the rational thing of like, hmm, math is math, and as long as you get your work done and work the number of hours that you're supposed to, then who the fuck cares if it was from eight to fucking five, or eleven to, you, who cares. I mean, obviously in certain jobs you have to have coverage of certain things. But like most, most office type jobs, like it doesn't fucking matter.

0:19:33 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly, who cares, right? Sure. No, it really doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, so that was that was a correlational study with like this actual supervisor employee relationship, which I think is really cool and valuable, but inferring causality from that is tricky. So they paired this with an experimental study that confirmed these same findings and then added to them a little bit. So they presented participants with performance profiles of of employees who had identical job performance, and the same total hours worked and everything.

But some participants saw a profile that said the employee worked from 7am to 3pm, and some saw a profiled employee that worked 11am to 7pm. And they replicated the real world findings. So evening or later start times were perceived to be less conscientious, and they were rated more negatively in terms of work performance. And they also replicated that supervisor chronotype effect. So only the participants with the early chronotype showed that effect, showed that sort of like stereotyping effect, right, that's think that's interesting, it Is it is chronotype chauvinism? I have that in all caps like 30 times in my notes.

It's It's terrible, right? And this is not the only study to converge on this point about stereotyping of of night owls, right? So there's been a handful of studies uh throughout the decades showing that people perceive people with late chronotypes to be less dependable, and and healthy, and punctual, and rational, and responsible, and self -disciplined, and studious, and more impulsive, and messy, and rebellious, and unhappy, and unpredictable. So that's really fun, right? There are a few positive stereotypes about us too, though. So in fairness, evening types are perceived to be more imaginative, interested in films, extroverted, which does not

0:20:36 Thomas: Chronotype racism. Damn it.

0:21:16 Thomas: Interested

0:21:16 Lindsey: Hold up, by the way. Interested in films.

0:21:16 Thomas: In films. I will not have

0:21:18 Lindsey: I don't know.

0:21:18 Thomas: It said about me that I'm not interested in films, so that's good. I'm glad.

0:21:21 Lindsey: Yeah. That was from like a study in the 80s. They assessed weird things back then. It was, it's interesting, um, but yeah, they're also perceived as more extroverted, which I don't, yeah, and uh, and also unconventional, which I think is a positive thing. Right, somebody's unconventional sounds, sounds quite sexy. I don't know, yeah.

0:21:40 Thomas: I bet it's positive for you and I, but I bet all these morning nerds will be like, oh, I don't want an unconventional person.

0:21:47 Lindsey: Actually, you're probably right, so we're not going to talk about this, but there, there is a correlation between uh eveningness, like, there's a political orientation correlation, so morning people are more likely to be more conservative. Conservative is that interesting? I

0:21:58 Thomas: I, look, it is time. I'm not saying we build camps, but I am saying, sorry, no, I'm not saying that we need to round up all the morning people and put an end to this. I'm just going to leave the side.

0:22:17 Lindsey: Was really waiting, what are you saying? Um, no, I mean, like, some, some kind of organization into things might make sense, because I bet, right, that if the tables were turned and society was structured to advantage evening people, morning people would look the same as evening people on a bunch of dimensions. Is where I think we're going. I think

0:22:32 Thomas: Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. Look at this unconventional person waking up at 7 a.m. and like jogging. What Bowie would be like a morning person, like, wow, what a, what an interesting guy. Yeah.

0:22:35 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. It leaves a crazy lifestyle. Yeah. So it's, it's pretty clear that the stereotype belies a perception that when someone gets up is more or less under their complete control. Like that's, I think what this suggests and that, you know, the fact that they're getting up later, you Know, it means that they just wanted to go to bed earlier and they're not a responsible human being. And as we've already discussed, chronotype is so much more complicated than that. You know, sleep -wake cycles are modifiable to an extent, but there's a lot lot about chronotype that we don't choose. And again, even if we did choose it, like, let's say that I completely have totally chosen to go to bed, you know, at 2am on a regular basis, like honestly, who cares?

0:22:47 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:25 Thomas: They

0:23:26 Lindsey: It's, yeah, okay. I'm very mad, I're sure you can tell, you see this, this sort of late attitude. But the reason I thought it was worth spending a few minutes on this is that occasionally you do see this attitude seep into the research on these relationships between chronotype and well-being, which is weird. And so we'll come back to this at a couple of points, but there are a handful of studies that I ran into where it's like they're reaching for an explanation that kind of belies that, like, they assume that late chronotypes are these kind of irresponsible people that are making bad choices. And the evidence just isn't there to support that particular causal explanation of everything. It's just, yeah. Anyway. Anyway.

0:24:01 Thomas: Got their calipers out measuring our clocks. Yeah.

0:24:04 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Like there was one on, there was one on chronotype and morality and they spent all this time in the introduction like going through, like, you know, combing through all these findings and being like, yeah evening people are higher on dark triad traits and they're more sexually promiscuous, which we know is immoral and like all this kind of stuff. And it's like very clearly toward the point of, at least to me, of painting this picture of late chronotypes as being like scary death metal atheists or something that are going to eat your babies. It's it's very weird.

0:24:31 Thomas: I'm realizing, though, that all the qualities that they, that morning people are like, ah, these night people have all these negative qualities, I think you and I are all like, oh, those are great qualities, so there really is just a divide here. Promiscuous, uh, interested in film, uh, these are all great things.

0:24:44 Lindsey: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Go well together.

0:24:49 Thomas: Yeah. This

0:24:49 Lindsey: Those pair well. Yeah, it's like wine and cheese. Okay, all right. So, got a few interesting things to tell you about, about these correlations with health and well-being. Let's start with, let's start with mental health. So in general, it does seem like the evidence pretty consistently suggests a small but reliable association between being evening inclined and being at higher risk for experiencing depression symptoms, and also for being at risk of an actual diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

So this association holds up in both clinical samples and in non-clinical samples. I read a 2021 meta-analysis by Norbury that examined the association between chronotype and depression symptoms across 41 studies that yielded 43 different effect sizes from about 28,000 participants. And across all of those studies, eveningness is associated with depression. But the effect sizes, typically kind of small. And one thing that Norbury noted was that there was substantial heterogeneity across the studies, meaning that the effect size is very substantially across studies.

Effect was consistent in direction. So it's not the case that, like, some studies showed that morning types are more prone to depression, and then other ones show that evening types, it's like it's consistently in the direction of evening types being more prone to it. But some of them, some of the effect sizes are really small or close to zero, and some of them are larger. And what this could indicate is that the relationship between chronotype and depression is modulated by something, right?

And so, for instance, Norbury evaluated whether he could account for those, that variability in effect sizes through, like, various study characteristics. So he looked at sample composition, you know, maybe the relationship has a different magnitude in clinical versus non-clinical samples. He looked at the way that they measured chronotype, so maybe the morning evening this questionnaire, which is the one that you and I took and talked about last time, versus the Munich chronotype questionnaire. Maybe they show smaller or larger effects or something.

Maybe the measure of depression matters. But none of those characteristics accounted for the variability in effect sizes. And neither did the sample size or the year of publication or the gender composition of the study samples. So he couldn't find the variable in this meta-analysis, anyway, that would explain why some studies obtained such larger effects than others, right? Based on the current findings, at least descriptively, it does look like there's a modest but consistent association with having a later chronotype and experiencing depression.

But the mechanism of this relationship is not clear from existing work. So depression could be causing a shift to a later prototype, could be that later chronotype is causing depression either directly or indirectly, which we'll get to in a minute. There could be some third variable that's causing both of them.

0:27:24 Thomas: Is all too real for me. I don't know. I, and I genuinely, as somebody who experiences all of what you just said, basically, I don't know, I, I don't know that I even have a solid handle on which comes first, the chicken or the egg, there. I don't know. Mm

0:27:26 Lindsey: I know. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:40 Lindsey: Glad you said that because it could the case that these things kind of mutually reinforce each other. They found evidence to that effect for some of the associations we're going to talk about. ADHD, we're gonna talk about in a little bit. And that one looks like they mutually reinforce other, which is kind of interesting.

0:27:51 Thomas: -hmm, that's interesting. ADHD as well. Oh, no, no, fucking wonder I'm off the charts here. I got every, every factor. And I also think not to get too personal, although I don't, I have no filter and I tend to, but I also Think with my mental health, like I like there, there are reasons with my health issues that I like being alone and not having anyone around and not all the time, but like, I, I do enjoy a certain amount of that time for myself, and nighttime, if I stay up later than everybody, then I finally, you, to be at peace for a little bit, and I think that's part of it too, so I got all these factors working for me.

0:27:55 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. I know. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. No, that occurred to me, too. I mean, that's that's always something that I've associated nighttime with. And it is it is kind of like a precious kind of protected time in that sense. And who knows, like what that really says about the causality, right? Like, is it, you know, I don't know. But I it is true that there are individual differences and how much people sort of crave some solitude, you you know, in their days. And so, I don't know, it's possible that that's definitely in the mix here. I don't know. Yeah, so that's depression.

0:28:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

0:29:03 Thomas: So that's depression, everybody.

0:29:06 Lindsey: Yeah. We're going to come back, we're going to loop around to depression again a little bit, but that's what the relationship looks like descriptively. Evidence that chronotype and anxiety are reliably associated is more mixed, it appears. So, some studies have found associations between, like, neuroticism and eveningness. And so neuroticism is a, it's a personality trait describing like negative emotionality sort of including like worry and anxiety and, um, you know, being very emotionally reactive. Some studies have found that association. Others haven't, uh, some other studies have suggested a disproportionate prevalence of evening types among folks diagnosed with anxiety disorders, but yeah, it is.

0:29:44 Thomas: That's interesting because I know, I know, that's kind of like, I, my intuition would be, oh, you're nervous, you're anxious, you can't sleep, but what but what's funny is, like, my, my brother has that anxiety problems. But weirdly, he can always go to sleep at night. And part of it is that I don't know if just all day being so anxious just wears you out. And you can eventually just be like, all right, I can go to bed. I can sleep. So I think it can kind of go either way.

0:29:50 Lindsey: So you can't sleep. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

0:30:06 Lindsey: Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. Because I mean, that's my first thought too, that if those two are connected, both causal directions can make sense to me in an equally plausible way. But that's interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, so like, a lot of these effects definitely could be heterogeneous, you know. For me, I know that being anxious means that I have trouble sleeping.

0:30:16 Thomas: Yeah. Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:30:30 Lindsey: But But yeah, maybe not for everybody. Yeah, so they so that that association between anxiety and actual diagnosed anxiety disorder and evening type has been found in some studies, but there was a large cohort study from 2015 that didn't replicate that association, so who knows? Was a 2019 paper of college students and sample of community adults that found that sleep quality and chronotype had independent contributions to anxiety, which was kind of interesting.

But I don't know, this is kind of a mixed bag, so I'm not sure exactly what to do with this. It seems like similar to depression, but maybe a little bit more mixed, a littlebit weaker. It looks like Like, there's a lot of variability across studies in terms of whether you see this relationship. And so I don't know whether that means there are some significant moderators of, you know, whether chronotype or sleep quality are both cause disruptions or, associated with anxiety, or what's going on here.

But it doesn't seem super clear yet. Knows with that one? And in terms, like, other mental health related problems, the research on chronotype is kind of scant. So there have been some scant studies on, like, bipolar depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and a few others. But the evidence on this is really scant, and the evidence is really mixed for these. So even more so than with mood and anxiety problems.

So studies on these disorders have actually yielded contradictory conclusions in some cases, with morningness being a risk factor in some studies and eveningness being risk factor and others. Others. So I decided not to summarize any of those because they contradict too much, I

0:32:03 Thomas: Right.

0:32:03 Lindsey: Think, for us to have any sense of what the story is there. So that's interesting.

0:32:07 Thomas: Mm-huh.

0:32:07 Lindsey: That's mental health. I also wanted to talk a little bit about some correlates that fall broadly into the category of cognitive functioning that I thought were interesting. So I found it very interesting, as we mentioned a minute ago, that ADHD has been associated in a number of studies with greater eveningness. And this holds for populations of children and adolescents and adults, which is interesting. And suggests that yes, yeah, eveningness among folks with an ADHD diagnosis is more common. And in particular, it appears to be most strongly, or chronotype appears to me most strongly related to inattention rather than hyperactivity, which are two distinct clusters of symptoms in ADHD that people can be high or low on. So some people who are diagnosed with ADHD are high on just one or the other, and some people are high on both, right? Yeah, so the evidence suggests that it's really that inattention piece that's associated with eveningness rather than the hyperactivity, which is kind of interesting.

0:32:57 Thomas: Ah, there you... Ding. Ding again. Ding.

0:33:03 Lindsey: Yeah. Ned, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and I think I said this a second ago, too. The evidence suggests that there may be actual reciprocal links here. So evening chronotypes may experience more severe severe ADHD symptoms and ADHD may, may cause behaviors that kind of reinforce greater, greater eveningness as well.

0:33:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:24 Thomas: It really is funny. I think that we've cracked it. Why I'm off the charts on this, I just have every different vector is going toward it. That's so funny.

0:33:24 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's cool. I was, I was showing up a lot in this stuff too. It was pretty fun.

0:33:38 Thomas: All the same stuff or what?

0:33:40 Lindsey: So far all this, all the same stuff. Yeah, there's some, oh man, there there's more coming. Right? So just hang hang on, hang on. There's more, there's more sames.

0:33:44 Thomas: Okay. All right. It correlates with how much your TV has been buried in your backyard by your dad. It's a one -to -one correlation, actually.

0:33:52 Lindsey: Oh no. Yeah.

0:33:54 Thomas: It's the strongest predictor.

0:33:56 Lindsey: It's the best predictor. Best predictor, yeah. Topic for another show. Stuff, again, right? Right, so about that mutually reinforcing piece, the extent to which eveningness could exacerbate like inattention symptoms or whatever could plausibly be just as easily about sleep disruption as about chronotype, right? If you're falling asleep later because of your endogenous clock, but you have to get up earlier than you want to be at school or work, and then you're sleep deprived. And sleep deprived does cause, you know, a lot of deficits that can look like ADHD, right? So if you do have ADHD, it could definitely exacerbate the symptoms. Okay. That's ADHD. I thought that was fun. Now, there some studies on, several, a number of studies, on cognitive ability and academic achievement and chronotype, which is interesting. And finally, we get just like the slightest win for evening types with this one. It's like the only positive thing that's been associated.

0:34:12 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:34:46 Thomas: They threw us a bone huh 2011

0:34:49 Lindsey: Yeah, but it's even this one's a mixed bag. So there's a 2011 meta -analysis by Preckle and colleagues that examine relationships between chronotype and cognitive ability, and academic achievement.

0:35:02 Thomas: Analysis by Lindsey in a mustache just like disguised as oh it looks like there's some positive things everybody with the night people, oh

0:35:05 Lindsey: Yep, that's me. Yeah. Looks, looks like, do you want to predict actually? So so it's chronotype and then there's two outcomes here. There's cognitive ability and then academic achievement. And one of them is positively related to eveningness and one of them is negatively related to eveningness.

0:35:22 Thomas: You would think that cognitive ability is positively related and academic achievement is negatively related. Holy crap, bing again, sharpest attack today, that is, is exactly my experience as well. But that, and that also is, I mean, I would imagine that that also correlates with ADHD, which is this thing that I, yeah, I've always, yeah.

0:35:27 Lindsey: Oh yeah. Ding again. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah probably so. And who knows how many studies account for that or look at that. So that's, yeah, that's a good thought there. Yeah, yeah. So in this meta-analysis, they looked at all these studies that got standardized intelligence test scores as their measure of cognitive ability and looked at academic achievement, and they operationalized this as GPA. And they found a small but significant positive correlation across the studies between eveningness and cognitive ability.

So eveningness was correlated with greater cognitive ability, and also a small, but significant negative correlation between eveningness and academic achievement. And there's a few kind of explanations for why this might be the case. So the authors of this paper suggest that, like, this could be attributable to a few things. Possible that eveningness causes people to engage in more active problem solving in their environments because the world isn't set up for evening people. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

They might be forced to do more of this, which might have an impact on the kinds of things measured on tests of cognitive ability. And and they, you know, they mentioned that it also could be a common genetic underpinning for some reason, you know, that's possible.

0:36:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:46 Lindsey: The reason that you might get the paradoxical worst school performance despite having slightly higher cognitive abilities may just be a synchrony effect, which I think we're already there, right? I think that we didn't have to, they didn't tell us that, I think, because like they're taking their tests and whatever that influence GPA during the day, it's unlikely that that's when evening types are at peak cognitive performance. And so, yeah, right? I will emphasize that these correlations are very small in magnitude. They do seem to be consistent, but they're in that 0.1 to 0.2 range, you know, so that's pretty weak.

0:37:20 Lindsey: But again, it is an effect that has been replicated a number of times. So I think it's reasonable to think this is a real but small association. And then I found this other study that I think you're going to like, and it kind of speaks to this sort of paradoxical effect a little bit. So Gorgel and colleagues published a paper in 2018 in which they tested something known as the compensation hypothesis. And so to set up the compensation hypothesis, past research has apparently shown, I didn't know this, a small negative relationship between cognitive ability and conscientiousness. So people who are high on conscientious tend to be somewhat lower on measures of cognitive ability for some reason.

0:37:20 Thomas: Well, that's weird.

0:37:56 Lindsey: I know. I thought so too. I'm really not sure what to do with this. Like in the paper, they mention potential genetic underpinnings or something, but it seems like a strange thing. But it shows up again and again. So that's true. And the compensation hypothesis suggests that the reason for this inverse correlation is that one way to compensate for having slightly lower cognitive abilities is just to develop highly conscientious habits. So pretty close analogy, I'd say, is that you can either rely on your excellent writing skills to write a decent paper at the last minute, or if you're not a great writer, you can start way in advance and work on it over time to achieve the same quality paper.

And So that's what they think may be going on here. That's interesting. And Gorgel and colleagues tested this hypothesis in conjunction with chronotype, with the idea that morning people are probably more conscientious in general, regardless of intelligence, but the evening people may have to develop conscientious habits if they are lower in cognitive abilities, because they face a special constellation of challenges. Because evening people, on average, are slightly lower in conscientiousness, we talked about that, than morning people.

Also, they are often required to perform tasks at times of the day that are suboptimal for them, given their endogenous circadian rhythms, right? Also I'd argue probably suboptimals sleep on average. And so they might have to develop conscientious habits to cope with those challenges if they are also lower in cognitive skills, or cognitive ability, is their argument. Argument and

0:38:33 Thomas: Well.

0:39:20 Thomas: Okay. Did I, maybe I'm not understanding what the conscientiousness is then that's sounding a little different than I thought. Oh,

0:39:24 Lindsey: Right, oh Okay, yeah, so, uh, conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits and it captures things like organization and punctuality, um, things like that. Yeah.

0:39:36 Thomas: Okay. Now it's all coming together. Yeah, I'm not that at all. I was, I was like, I thought conscientious. I'm like, yeah, it's considerate. I was thinking considerate of others.

0:39:37 Lindsey: Okay. Oh. Gotcha. Okay.

0:39:48 Thomas: Yeah. And I was worried because this is the first one that cut differently than I thought, but no, nevermind. We're all, all cylinders firing on all cylinders. Got it. I am disorganized and, uh, what was the other thing? I already forget. I can't remember things.

0:39:48 Lindsey: Yeah. Perfect. But You can write the paper at the last minute, can't you?

0:40:02 Thomas: I, That's my only choice. That's the only thing I, I don't have, there's no other option available to me. So yeah, and

0:40:08 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome, yeah, so this, so this is their hypothesis, and I thought that was, I, yes, I thought it was super interesting, and their results did support that hypothesis in the sample of about 400 Polish participants, so they found that conscientious So They Found that, um, and intelligence were not correlated among morning folks, so it was just sort of like conscientious was just sortof high among morning books, regardless of, um, how, how they performed on this intelligence Measure.

0:40:21 Thomas: I'm Polish, gee. No, I'm not, I'm Just kidding, those

0:40:35 Lindsey: But among evening types, conscientiousness and intelligence were negatively correlated. So evening folks who were lower on a standard intelligence measure scored at about the same level of conscientious as morning types. But folks who are relatively high on that measure scored significantly lower than morning folks on conscientious. So that's fun.

0:40:35 Thomas: Fuckers So It really seems like they got, they, you know, then the night types who unfortunately aren't like super brainiacs have to develop these coping mechanisms. Okay. That

0:41:04 Lindsey: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, Exactly. Oh, and I'm realizing I skipped, skipped some notes earlier that, um, talked about this, but, like, uh, that whole stereotype about, uh, night folks being less conscientious and stuff, um, there is a grain of truth to it, so again, it's a, it's weak correlation, but it does seem to be fairly consistent across studies that you see this sort of weak negative correlation between, um, and conscientiousness, so evening types are slightly less conscientous, I thought That was worth saying. Anyway, fun stuff, stuff. Cognitive functioning, I thought that those were super interesting. Last category of things I wanted to talk about is physical health and health behaviors. So across a number of different indicators, evening types are at higher risk for a bunch of various physical health problems, including risk of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, cancer, cancer, high blood pressure, as well as a variety of behavioral patterns that are also linked with diminished physical health, like being less physically active, being more likely to smoke cigarettes and to overconsume alcohol, and to use other recreational drugs, including marijuana and cocaine and ecstasy and amphetamines, and so on.

0:41:06 Thomas: Makes sense. Okay. Yeah.

0:42:16 Thomas: That All makes sense. Also, I'll tell you, it's hard, especially, especially in California, as a night person, there's not really a time of the day that I can go outside. By the time I wake up, is 107 already. So yeah, like the only time if I wanted to, you know, get, get active in, in my life, it would be really hard. I mean, I play hockey super late at night, so that's how that, and it's indoors. So that's, that's How I do it. But like, I can't, there's no time that I'm awake. That's a good jogging time.

0:42:29 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Right?

0:42:47 Thomas: You got to wake up so early here to not die of heat stroke.

0:42:51 Lindsey: So are you saying that it's, it's like possible that this constellation of things does not mean that evening types are like lazy pieces of shit and that's why they're unhealthy? Oh.

0:43:00 Thomas: No, I'm definitely a lazy piece of shit.

0:43:02 Lindsey: Okay, okay, all right, well good, I'm glad we're on the same page there. No, um, no, so all, all of these associations are there. Oh, and in one, in one review paper where they were talking about all this stuff, um, along with all the substance abuse and addiction stuff, they few, they threw in stuff like compulsive internet use, computer gaming, and social media addiction into this category, and I think we've talked before about my feelings about framing certain things as addictions, but um.

0:43:20 Thomas: Yeah. Right, right, right.

0:43:27 Lindsey: Yeah, so those, that's all in there too, so again, it's just contributing to this kind of picture of evening types is um, very dysregulated kinds of, not, not high in self-control kinds of things. Um, all these associations are there. As with the mental health effects, though, it's, it's really not clear what explains those, those associations, the causality could go a number of different ways, right?

So some researchers have suggested that mismatch between endogenous rhythms and the social clock could account for the relationship with addictions in particular, whereas others have gone hunting for neural differences in reward processing among folks with evening chronotypes to see if that could explain the difference, right. And actually, it's kind of interesting, one study found neural evidence that evening folks process rewards differently than morning people, so they have like a blunted response in the anticipation of reward. But so that's an ADHD thing too, though, which is interesting. So but yeah, they have a bl hunted response in terms of anticipating reward, but then a heightened response to actually receiving a reward. And apparently, a similar pattern is associated with higher risk of addiction and alcohol dependence. So the authors say that maybe, you know, evening types are sort of neurologically predisposed to addiction.

However, I would hasten to add, a few studies have suggested associations between sleep deprivation, both acute and chronic, and reward responsiveness, and addiction, and emotion regulation, both behaviorally and with respect to these patterns of neural activation. So, you know, even this kind of evidence doesn't really rule out, like, sleep problems as being the actual culprit here as opposed to sleep timing, in my opinion. So, it's kind of interesting, though. All last important category of physical health thingies. Problems.

0:44:13 Thomas: Yep, there we go. Yeah, true.

0:45:09 Lindsey: Yeah, maybe this is too obvious.

0:45:11 Thomas: Should have been thing one,

0:45:12 Lindsey: I know. Yeah. Yeah, evening.

0:45:12 Thomas: Yeah. It's because you're so disorganized as a night person.

0:45:15 Lindsey: It's it is exactly what it is. Evening chronotype is associated with a variety of sleep related complaints.

0:45:28 Lindsey: I, sleep quality, more daytime sleepiness, greater fatigue, insufficient sleep duration, trouble falling asleep, and severe insomnia, and also something that sounds extremely fake to me called delayed sleep phase syndrome. And I'm going to quote at length from stanfordhealthcare.org so you can see how absolutely fake this is. It's just chronotype chauvinism. So, quote, delayed sleep phase syndrome is a disorder in which a person's sleep is delayed by two or more hours beyond what is considered acceptable or conventional bedtime. The delayed sleep then causes difficulty in being able to wake up at the desired time. For example, a person with delayed sleep phase syndrome may fall asleep after midnight instead of at 10 p.m. and then will have difficulty getting up in the morning for school or work. People with delayed sleep phase syndrome generally have difficulty falling asleep unless they go to bed very late, usually some hours after midnight because the internal clock is sending alerting signals until late into the night. Waking producing strong alerting signs.

0:46:33 Lindsey: Unless you have other sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea or insomnia, you may actually sleep well with delayed sleep phase syndrome in terms of duration and quality quality of sleep. The problem is that the delay makes it difficult to wake up in time for typical school or work day. Okay, yeah, so don't call it that then. Don't call a delayed sleep phase syndrome.

0:46:52 Thomas: This really Reminded me of like the old timey, like, do you know someone who's on reefer, you know? And it's like all these basic describing, or or sounds like scaring about a nor totally normal thing.

0:47:05 Lindsey: It's not delayed sleep phase syndrome. It's your work starts too early syndrome. That's what that is. I don't like it. Again, it is just part of this systemic thing against... Yeah, I don't like it anyway. So I thought that was funny. Last sleep -related disturbance that I would like to touch on, just because I think that you'll really like this one. I think we'll have fun yelling about this one, it's about the ease of adjustment to daylight savings time. So people with later chronotypes have a harder time adjusting to daylight savings time compared to early chronotypes. I know you're shocked, are you shocked?

0:47:30 Thomas: God. I feel like you just made all this up just for me like you're just like I'm gonna just do a bunch of science stuff that just tells Thomas why everything's wrong with him and it all adds up. Yeah.

0:47:36 Lindsey: I did. Yeah, this was all a dream, sorry, none of it's real. Know what, to it as evening types having a harder time adjusting daylight savings, it understates it. Let me tell you about this study. This is interesting. So yeah, Kahneman and colleagues, 2007 paper, conducted a 16-week observational study of about 100 European participants that were living, it's important to say they're living at between 40 and 60 latitudes. So at these latitudes, annual fluctuation in day length is pretty dramatic, right?

0:47:45 Thomas: Ah. Mm -hmm. Wait.

0:48:11 Lindsey: They collected data for four weeks before and four weeks after the transition from daylight savings time to standard in the fall. So four weeks before and after the clocks shift back, meaning quote unquote, an extra hour of sleep, which isn't extra, right? They're just, that's just what it should be, right. They four weeks beforehand, four weeks after that transition, and then the same thing for the transition from standard time to daylight savings time in the spring. So that's the one where you lose sleep. They measured participants' chronotype and examined whether people with early and late chronotypes differed in terms of how quickly they transitioned their sleep times to the new time. And they found that both early and later chronotypes adapted quickly when transitioning to standard time, right? That's the good time change. But while early chronotypes adjusted quickly to daylight savings time, later chronotype adapted only partially and temporarily. And

0:49:05 Thomas: I, that's, I thought it was, the I thought daylight savings time was the good one, don't we want permanent daylight savings time? I think, no.

0:49:07 Lindsey: No, no. I mean, that's What they're going to do. And maybe, maybe that's it.

0:49:13 Thomas: That is what we want, are you sure these aren't mixed up?

0:49:15 Lindsey: Daylight savings Time Is the one where you lose an hour. Yeah.

0:49:16 Thomas: Yeah. But if you're always on that, you don't lose anything. Oh, okay, so it's the, I got it, it's better time, but it's harder one to adjust to because of the. Gotcha.

0:49:27 Lindsey: Because You're going back and actually, I, I didn't take notes on this because it's a little bit beyond the scope, but like after reading this paper, like I'm wondering like if daylight savings time isn't somewhat problematic, like if standard time wouldn't be the better one to stick with, but I, I don't know, it's anyway, maybe we really should do the do the episode that's just us about daylight savings time.

0:49:27 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, that one, we'll table this discussion.

0:49:49 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I okay. This is this I thought was interesting, right? So so again, so chronotypes adapted quickly to daylight savings time. Late chronotypes adopted only partially and temporarily. And they reverted back to their their baseline sleep times about two weeks after the transition. So like, yeah, so if they were going to sleep at 1am standard time, and transition to 1am daylight savings Time, which is midnight night standard time, they were going to bed at 2 a.m. daylight savings time by about two weeks after the transition.

0:50:04 Thomas: Yep. That's what happens.

0:50:18 Thomas: Yep.

0:50:19 Lindsey: And so, you know, my first thought in reading that result is that that probably translates into sleep deprivation, right? Like shorter sleep durations. And the researchers did say that sleep duration in the sample overall declined by an average of about an hour after the transition to daylight savings times. But they didn't report whether that was different as a function of chronotype. And I was like, but surely somebody's looked at that. And they have. So So Allibrand and colleagues in 2014 did this. They did a two-year study with a really large 10,000-person multinational sample, and they found that early types didn't show seasonal changes in the total time spent sleeping, but among late types, they observed a decrease in sleep duration during daylight savings time, right?

Like, that's a problem, I think, potentially, right, it's not just about that week after daylight savings savings time, which is what I think subjectively, it's usually what it when it feels most acute when you notice how bad it is. But like those those effects persist throughout the period is how I read these. And I mean, these are only two studies or whatever, but like, I don't know. I thought that was fun. And, you know, I know we both feel personally offended by daylight savings

0:50:25 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Yeah. Right, right, yeah.

0:51:25 Lindsey: Time.

0:51:25 Thomas: Was going to say, this episode is called Explaining Everything in My Life, certainly, and I guess yours, too.

0:51:30 Lindsey: Yeah, for sure. Right. Daylight savings time was always my favorite rants to go on in class, class. Um, and college students are a great audience for that, right? Because their, their chronotypes tend to be lower anyway, but they're also sleep deprived, so um,

0:51:34 Thomas: Yeah, it's the worst. Yeah. Well, maybe, yeah, do that episode eventually. Line is, stop changing the fucking clock, just pick a time I on, but uh, then secondarily we can talk about which time, but changing the clock is just absurd, there's no reason for it, yeah.

0:51:54 Lindsey: I I Totally Agree, they are two separate issues and we can argue about both of them for sure, right? Yeah, no, it's it's my least favorite thing that that ever happens, ever.

0:52:04 Thomas: And I know it very, it really varies based on where you are, like it just does, you, but like, okay, let's uh sort that out with time zones, you, not every solution works for every single time zone, that's why I send it to the states, let the states do what they want to do, well, we'll cover all.

0:52:04 Lindsey: Um, Yeah, Yeah, or just don't keep social time the same across all the, yeah, right? Like, whatever.

0:52:21 Thomas: Yeah. Totally. Be, don't be so attached to when the hours of school are, you know. Yeah. All,

0:52:26 Lindsey: Exactly, right. You could shift school times and work times. Yeah.

0:52:29 Thomas: Right, well, that explained everything in my life and uh now I'm no longer confused and I'll continue to go to bed late and and forced to wake up early and have all these negative health consequences, that's fine, but at least I know why, I'll be dying early. That Was a lot of fun, thanks so much, and uh, by the way, patrons, I think we're gonna do a little patron episode, episode, um, kind of like a, maybe a life updatey episode, so uh, because we don't do enough for patrons, so that'll be fun. patreon.com/seriouspod, a little bonus episode, major life change stuff I think um tune in for that otherwise uh we'll see you next time

0:52:40 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:53:12 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.