Productivity gurus insist we get up at five. Science is not so sure

Getting up early is one of the constants in the agendas of productivity gurus who seem to multiply on the Internet today. The popularity of these Techniques to improve our productivity and, as many promise, even our health, has shot upBut is getting up at five in the morning really such a good idea?

Getting up early can have its advantages. One of the main ones we often hear about is having time for ourselves during those hours. Enjoying a few hours without feeling the need to check our email inbox can help many people concentrate. And it can also prevent anxiety for others.

Getting up early can also help us keep some habits healthy. For example, exercising regularly or preparing a varied and nutritious breakfast.

Setting an early hour for getting up can also help us maintain a more regular sleep. The quality of our sleep depends on many factorsThe amount of time we sleep is one thing, but experts also point out the importance of maintaining regular sleep.

Getting up early has its advantages, all right. So, case closed? Should we listen to the gurus and start waking up at five in the morning? Not necessarily. The truth is that there are important factors to take into account. For starters, getting up early is also a good idea. It may have its drawbacks.

If we want to wake up early we should also go to bed earlier so that this change does not cause us to lose hours of sleep. This also means that We will have to have dinner earlier, leave the screens earlier, etc.. That is, if we want more time in the morning we will have to sacrifice it in the afternoon. The effects derived from this detail are diverse.

For example, this can affect our social life. Enjoying those hours for ourselves can be advantageous, but if it comes at the expense of spending time with friends and family, we can end up losing out on health and well-being.

It is worth noting that Spanish timetables have more to do with geography than with the Central European time zone. That is, since it gets dark and light later here, we tend to live one hour behind. Sometimes more.

This has another effect besides the social one: depending on our location and the time of year, we can end up losing hours of sunlight, a light that is not only good for adjusting our daily rhythms, but is also necessary for our body to synthesize vitamin D.

Every body, a world

The problem with all this is that it is not in our hands to weigh the advantages and disadvantages and simply choose what compensates us. The fault lies with what we call chronotypes. Each person has their own chronotypea biological clock with unique characteristics.

It is not about, in addition to a dual classification between early risers and those who can make the most of the evenings, but more likely a spectrum. Within this spectrum, there can also be extreme cases of people with unusual schedules.

Regardless of being affected by external factors, our internal clock is strongly influenced by our geneticsChanging it is therefore a fight against our own body and, consequently, could result in more problems than benefits, both from the point of view of productivity and from that of health.

However, there are strategies to make it easier for those who want to get up early. An example of this is A study published in 2022 in the magazine Nature Communicationswhich indicated that the key to this was based on three factors: sleep, exercise and breakfast.

That is, if we want to get up early more easily, it is best to make sure we sleep the hours our body requires, exercise regularly and ensure a nutritious breakfast, rich in complex carbohydrates but low in sugars, the team pointed out responsible for the study.

The science of sleep is complex and it is rare to be able to derive generalised advice for the entire population. Both the hours of sleep we need and the time of day when we can make the best use of our waking hours depend on various factors that range from beyond genetics.

For example, our rhythm can be marked by our work schedules or our daily chores, social life, etc. Russell Foster, director of the Institute of Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, recalled consulted by The Guardian that not everyone can afford such changes in their daily rhythms.

An inverse relationship in the causal relationship can be seen here: we are not going to have more money for waking up earlier, but if we have more economic resources, we can dedicate more time in our lives to experimenting with these changes.

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Image | Miriam Alonso