"Sleep doctors say that with a few tools, the right motivation, rigid scheduling and several alarm clocks, you too, can become a morning person — or at least trick your boss into thinking you are."
I have my doubts about this- the article tells the same old shit you always hear, no caffeine, go to bed at 9 p.m. even on a Saturday night if that's how early you get up for work, blah de blah- but here's the interesting bit:
"The body tells time with a master clock in the brain, a pinhead-sized cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus that takes cues from optic nerves that signal sunlight. By sticking people in isolation chambers, scientists discovered that most people's internal clocks run a bit longer — about a half-hour on average — than the sun's 24-hour cycle. That's why, for most people, it's easier to stay up later and compensate by sleeping in than to force yourself to sleep early and wake early, explains Dr. Eliza Sutton, an acting assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington. Morning larks are those rarer birds whose body clock is shorter than 24 hours, so they wake up raring to go.
Our body clocks are genetic and hardwired so chances are you've been one way or the other for most of your life, with some exceptions — adolescence and old age. A combination of developmental and cultural factors keep many teens awake until the wee hours of the morning, about the time many grandparents start stirring awake.
"Around puberty it becomes very difficult to force a kid to go to sleep, they are sleep-deprived but they just can't fall asleep," says Dr. Ralph Pascualy, head of Seattle's Swedish Sleep Medicine Institute. At the other end of the spectrum, "As we age, our battery winds down earlier and the sleep cycle advances."
Also depressing is the sidebar: "When time skips ahead at 2 a.m. Sunday, we'll be forced to reset not only the clocks around the house, but also the ones inside our brains. While a one-hour loss doesn't sound like much, for already sleep-deprived people, especially night owls, it's a cruel double-whammy.
"It's perverse because you have to get up earlier, yet there's less light in the morning and more light in the evening, which works to shift your body clock later," says Dr. Al Lewy, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University. This makes it the equivalent of two hours of jet lag."