Your body has a perfect time for everything

Picture this. Your partner springs out of bed at 5:30am, full of beans, ready to go for a run. You, on the other hand, would happily set fire to anyone who speaks to you before nine.

It’s not weakness. It’s not laziness. It’s genetics.

There’s a tiny stretch of code on your genome called PER3. A single flip of that gene decides whether you wake up before dawn or want to throttle the alarm at seven. It also decides when your body produces melatonin, cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine.

That schedule is called your chronotype. You don’t choose it. You’re born with it.

I came across this recently in the work of sleep specialist Dr Michael Breus. He identifies four:

Lions wake before dawn, peak between 9:30 and 11:30, and want bed by nine. About one in eight people, including me.

Bears run on the standard nine-to-five clock and peak around midday. Half the population.

Wolves hate mornings, get their best ideas at 2am, and account for most of the world’s creatives and entrepreneurs.

Dolphins are the rare ones. Highly intelligent, slightly anxious, light sleepers who crave more sleep than their bodies will give them, my wife Sarah included.

Here’s why this matters. When your activity matches your chronotype, your body produces the right hormones at the right time, and you do everything better. When it doesn’t, you’re swimming upstream all day.

A study at the University of Minnesota moved school start times by one hour. Pupils improved by a full grade. C students became B students. B students became A students. Same kids.

Same brains. Different timing.

If you’ve spent your life thinking you’re broken because you can’t function at 7am, you might just be a wolf in a lion’s job.