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Can You Change The Way You Are 

As I’ve already noted, night owl and early bird behaviour is not learned. It is a response to our genetic program and our body is simply "doing what comes naturally." Night owls who are having difficulty getting up early in the morning and early birds who are wanting to go to sleep early in the evening are usually doing so because their body is telling them that it needs sleep.

Human beings, however, are very flexible organisms and can often overcome natural physiological needs and behaviours. This is the case for night owls who must get up early every morning to go to work. They temporarily overcome their physiological need for sleep and attempt to get on with their daily tasks. In some cases, one might even believe that they were early birds. Early birds, on the other hand, who are required to work late into the night overcome their need for sleep early in the evening, and one might think that they were night owls.

But this ability to be flexible is deceiving. Night owls and early birds who are on schedules other than their preferred ones over a long period of time, will become chronically sleep-deprived and may experience a variety of physical and emotional problems.

Our natural night owl or early bird characteristics can also become accentuated by lifestyle or environmental conditions. Night owls who are musicians or who work in late-night restaurants often find that their bedtime gets extended later and later so that they become even more extreme night owls than they would naturally be. Early birds who work in early morning radio or television find, on the other hand, that they must rise even earlier than they normally would and must go to bed very early in the evening. As a result, they become even more extreme early birds.

But all of this suggests only degrees of adjustment of our natural characteristics and not an actual change. Consider this analogy. If you have dark hair and would prefer to be a blond, you can dye your hair or buy a blond wig. On the surface, you appear to have blond hair, but this is a temporary situation. It does not change the fact that your natural hair color is dark.

So, too, with our biological rhythms. We can temporarily overcome them, but we do not change them. Where there are no other extenuating circumstances or conditions, we will revert to our natural tendencies. This is most readily seen with night owls who will resume sleeping later in the morning during the weekend or when they are on vacation.