Sleep research – there are owls and larks?


It comes to a good night’s sleep, can pray for the people a number of tips down. The bed should only be for Sleeping, to warm it, may be worse cold, of course, all of the sleep hygiene. What many are less aware of: it is also Important to sleep at the right time.

How unnerving, the nights can be otherwise, shows the extreme case of a woman, the bat in Munich the Team to a Sleep doctor Till Roenneberg for help. Miserable was her sleep, said they. In the evening, she was always extremely tired, but you Wake up in the middle of the night again.

As the doctors analyzed the nights of the woman diagnosed, however, not a sleep problem, but one with the rhythm of our society.

“The patient is one of the extreme early types”, says Roenneberg the case at the Congress of the German society for sleep research and sleep medicine in Hamburg. “You should really go to bed and get up again.” Although this clock runs counter to our society, in the, in Parts still from 20:15 clock in the evening viewing begins, felt the woman message as a relief.

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“You don’t know since then that she is sick,” says Roenneberg, who researched at the University of Munich chronobiology of the people. “And she has your quality of sleep since then, even in the Hand.” An exciting movie, it comes can OS aware of a part of your sleep. A boring evening before her, she lays eight to bed. Only one thing is not possible: The internal clock change.

Larks, owls, and many pigeons

The company in Early – and late-types are divided into larks and owls, among sleep physicians, as well recognized like the fact that some people Shoe size 36 to wear and the other Shoe size 46. “We should, however, Think away from the bimodal,” says Roenneberg. “Extreme larks and extreme owls are so rare as giants and dwarves. In addition, there is another Type, I call them the pigeons. And there are many.”

How our inner clock is ticking, is stored in the genes. You ensure that people, animals and even plants, many processes after a day-and-night rhythm to teach. The sun goes down, dim plants, their photosynthesis apparatus, in order to save energy. People use the night to the fat and sugar storage to your muscles to replenish.

But there is a Problem. Our internal clocks are rarely clocked in exactly at 24 hours. In some people, the days are a bit shorter, others a little longer, such as Jürgen Aschoff, Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for behavioural physiology in the Bavarian town of Andechs, noted already in the sixties, in experiments in a Bunker.

Circadian rhythms: Experiments in the Wehrmacht bunker

To find out whether people have an internal clock, sent to Aschoff 1963, several Volunteers for three to four weeks in a sound-proof military bunker. Without the light of day, clock, alarm clock, Radio, or television. Aschoff wanted to see, when the day begins and ends, if it is solely controlled by the body.

The results were promising – of the conditions in the war bunker, but so contrary, that Aschoff was a year later, a research bunker build. There was a living-bedroom, a shower, a toilet, a small kitchen, all surrounded by a metre-thick walls. Pressure gauge in the floor and bed covered the activity of the inhabitants.

Monitoring: In the case of the “Bunker” in Andechs registered researchers, with the aid of numerous measuring instruments in the activities of subjects who lived voluntarily completely shielded from the outside world.

In the following 20 years, about 300 Volunteers for a time attracted a long. Many students were preparing for exams. Their lives also followed without a clock, and daylight to a strict rhythm. This lasted, however, often a little longer than 24 hours, with some a bit shorter. Part of these deviations are summed so that the participants followed after four weeks, one to several hours or even several days of suspended rhythm.

The effect of light: When Camping, we are all the same

Naturally prevents the light of day such an extreme shift. It is our most important clock is. In the nineties, researchers discovered that deep in the eyeball, in addition to rods and cones, a third Form of sense cells: the photosensitive ganglion cells.

To See this do nothing. Your task is to detect the brightness and to report this information to the clock in the brain. They react strongly to blue light, especially in the light of day. The more sunlight a person is exposed, the better the body compensates for the inaccuracies of the internal clock and the less it shows, whether he is a lark or an owl.

“If you send people out of the city without artificial light for Camping, to approach their rhythms,” says Roenneberg. “Most people are a little early awake, and tired earlier. Only in the case of the stark early types of the rhythm shifts to the rear.”

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In our society, almost no one benefited, however, from the important clock. We have the light of day and with it the intense blue radiation out of our lives and out of the Morning banished. The internal clocks will not calibrate at start of Day new. The cells in our eyeball to register in the evening, increased artificial lighting, and to report to the brain that is no sleeping time.

“The result is that our internal clocks are now very much later than they once were,” says Roenneberg.

Life with alarm clock: social jet lag of our population

Sleep doctor the follow call social jet lag. Most of the people have got into the habit of a weekly structure, where you during the week, an alarm clock must get up and only on the weekend, if it allows the family to sleep in. Only a few early-types are in luck, you fit into the pattern. “Most of the questioning, the not times, each night ends with an alarm clock, a sleeping night,” says Roenneberg.

To the victims are one of the owls among the students, because during puberty, all the internal clocks to move a piece to the rear. For a survey, researchers at the University of Tübingen, 132 high school graduates in Baden-Württemberg to your Chrono types and their Abinoten. The late types had, on average, poorer grades than the early types, several other studies came to similar results.

Although researchers have known for decades that each person is wired a little differently, forcing the company is still all a similar, often much too early in the rhythm. With significant consequences: “he Who sleeps permanently in the wrong time, is sick,” says Roenneberg. “It’s like safety shoes, which are only available in one size. We squeeze it all in and surprised that some of the bubbles get.”


Conclusion: There are not only early risers and night owls, but also a Type of the pigeons. To determine which group it belongs to, the genes. In addition, the light changes the rhythm. His internal clock is permanently ignored, is sick. Doctors speak of a social jet lag.