4 Reasons Science says Night Owls are Smarter than Early Birds

We all know that the old saying goes, “the early bird gets the worm.” While that may be true at times, sometimes that worm may not be worth getting up early for. People who are night owls tend to have a hard time getting up in the morning, but they feel like they are more productive in the evening. There may be some science that proves that night owls are more intelligent than early birds and vice versa, but your average night owl isn’t concerned about that. A night owl would rather tell you the following four reasons why they are more intelligent than the early birds in the world.

1. Night Owls are More Creative
Most night owls don’t know why they are more creative than most people, they just know that they are. If a person has a job to do late at night, they are more likely to improvise rather than go by the book. That could be because there is less guidance, or because they have no idea what to do and they just have to wing it. Either way, it forces them to be creative to get the job done. The London School of Economics proposed that night owl are natural defiant of conventional things – like working during daylight hours, which is believed to be an evolutionary trait.

2. Night Owls have More Time to Think on Their Own
Thinking too much may not always be a good thing, but that’s not the case for night owls. They are usually spending a lot of alone time because their family, friends or co-workers are sleeping or doing something non-productive. Night owls will tell you that their best ideas will come when they are on their own and have time to think. That doesn’t happen if you get up early and spend most of your time around other people.

3. Night Owls are Always Well Rested
By the time the night owls roll out of bed, the early birds have already had a cup or two of coffee and feel like they have had a productive morning. The night owls usually don’t even need coffee to get going because they usually get better rest. When you stay up until you can’t take it anymore, your body goes into a much deeper sleep. When that happens, you don’t need as much sleep to get the rest that you need to have a productive day. In fact, research has even gone as far to show that night owls performed better at a reaction-time task later in the day than their early-bird A rested mind thinks a lot more clearly than a tired mind, so that’s another benefit that the night owls have over the early birds.

4. Night Owls are More Relaxed and Attentive
You won’t find many night owls that get stressed out very easily. Most of them are very relaxed and don’t show their stress very much. Because of that, their mind thinks more clearly and they are able to be more attentive for a longer period of time throughout the day. Early birds tend to be tenser and get stressed out easily, which leads to cloudy thinking and less productivity. According to a study from the 1990’s, early birds showed much higher levels of cortisol – the stress hormone.

Night owls tend to get a lot of grief from the early birds because the early birds can sometimes put in a half a day of work before the night owls stroll into the office. However, any night owl will tell you that they do their job better when the early birds go home for the night. And since the night owls are a lot more relaxed, you won’t find them getting upset at the early birds for getting their day started a lot earlier. The good thing about most night owls is that they are humble, so most of them won’t tell you that they are more intelligent than you, they just know it.

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