18/07/2022 Nicholas Higgins

Night

‘What hath night to do with sleep?’, John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

We all know one smug early bird who quotes some ancient Greek philosopher or founding father about the virtues of waking up early. ‘Own your morning and elevate our life’, they say. ‘Only winners wake up early’, they preach. ‘Oh but the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, starts his day at 3:45am!’ Tosh I say.

There is nothing glamorous about the morning. There are teeth to be brushed, trains to catch and desks to be sat at. There are structures and strictures to contend with; responsibilities to be bear and realities to face. This is the time of day for sober, concentrated, binary thinking. But it is at night, free of the cares of the day, that the wine and the talk begin to flow. It is in the thickness of the night that the free-wheeling, insightful, memorable conversations happen. 

Darkness isn’t just rock n roll. At night there are no questions, emails, texts, phone calls or social media notifications. There are no meetings or appointments scheduled. Our noisy families and raucous neighbours have gone to sleep. The traffic stops. To any one inclined to solitude, such quietude is intoxicating. The mad, hurried world of the daytime becomes still, tranquil, peaceful. Free form the myriad distractions of everyday life, you’re left to loll in your own thoughts, get in the ‘flow’ and let ideas run amok. The left brain - analytical and rational - gives way to the right - imaginative and individualistic.  

Science seems to back this feeling too. Italian researchers have found evidence that night owls who sleep in are more creative than their day-bound peers. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain with the ability to concentrate, gets tired at the end of the day. According to Brant Hassler, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, ‘with less of that top down control and cognitive inhibition, the brain might be freed up for more divergent thinking, allowing one to make new associations between different concepts more easily’.  For the night owl, it is only at night that the mind is wrested from its daytime torpor and the febrile imagination awakened. 

This would explain why (almost) every great artist, musician and writer has been a night owl. Kafka sat down to write at 11pm and worked until 3 am. Jackson Pollock worked well into the night, not waking till 1pm for his customary breakfast of coffee and cigarette. Pablo Picasso, who produced 16,000 works over his lifetime, didn’t hit the sack until 5am. Gustav Flaubert, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley were all creatures of the night. These are the non-conventional, creative spirits we rightly idolise. People who created, innovated and thought outside the box. 

Still today’s work-obsessed culture demands that all and sundry conform to early rising. This is great if you are a ‘morning person’ (our genes dictate whether we are). You will be up and away ahead of your night owl peers; you’ll be more aligned with the workday and likely to achieve much more. What, however, of the night owl who is forced to wake up at 7am? They wake up as if they were still asleep and feel like crap for most of the day. Little wonder they are though to achieve less, in the conventional work setting at least. The cards have been stacked against them.

If this wasn’t enough, late riser’s are tyrannised by guilt. We are all familiar with those feelings of self-hatred and littleness when we lay in, ‘half the day has already passed!’ we cry. The societal picture of the night owl is an idle, irresponsible, lay about, just too lazy to rise from his slumber. In the West we have truly inculcated the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the earliest moment possible. Have we forgotten that Einstein urged us to ‘never stop questioning’?

The fact is that someone who hits the lights at 3 am and wakes up at 10am, is absolutely no different to the person who goes to bed at 9pm and wakes up at 4am. Both have the same 7 hours of sleep. The waking hours have just been rearranged to when they are most productive. As numerous studies have shown, this is more than a matter of choice, night owls are born this way - it’s genetic and biological. 

Perhaps we should accommodate for the 1 in 4 who are not made ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’ by early rising.  One quarter of us are made sickly, poor and stupid by it. Take a trip on the London underground between 8 and 10am and see for yourself the misery it causes.

I at least, stand with Dr Johnson, ‘whoever thinks of going to bed before 12 o’clock is a scoundrel’.