If you know enough people, you likely know of ones who are on all different schedules, practically speaking as well as energetically speaking. There are some people who are night owls, who are fuzzy in the morning and find that they are more alert, awake, sharp and focused at night.
And there are others who are morning people. Who are freshest in the early hours and lose steam as they head through their day.
How our circadian rhythm tends to operate is part of our temperament and consequently basically part of our personality. Researchers refer to these tendencies as chronotypes.
Night Owls Are All About that Sexy Time — But the Morning People Are Having Most of the Babies #
I stumbled onto a study recently that had an interesting premise: It looked at correlations between a person’s chronotype and their sexual behavior. Previous studies (for example, this one) have established that night owls (a variable referred to in the literature as “eveningness”) are more outgoing and open-minded.
This latest study also added the following findings to our collective understanding of what other differences can be found between morning people and night owls:
- Night owls tend to have their first sexual experiences at younger ages than morning people.
- Night owls engage in more frequent sex than morning people.
- Night owls report more sexual partners over their lifetime than morning people.
- Morning people are more monogamously inclined than night owls.
- Morning people have more children than night owls.
The team was rather surprised by the last finding, as they expected to find that the group that had more sex also would produce more children. However, it was found that night owls tend to have sex more often for recreation than for procreation.
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This was a very interesting study for me personally to stumble across. I score on the scale as “neither type,” in the dead-center middle range. (Which is a possibility, yes, not everyone is squarely one or the other.)
I tend to strike night owls as a morning person type, but for true morning people I’m a bit slow/low key. And I have no problem staying up late when I need to.
I’m amused by this — as my own predisposition towards monogamy vs non-monogamy is also dead center (I can do either quite happily without much of a preference and consider myself more ambiamorous than strictly polyamorous). And there’s a correlation between chronotype and monogamy/non-monogamy preferences.
Oh well. Guess I’m a fence sitter. Again. Such is life.
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Curious about which chronotype you are (or if you, like me, fall in the middle)? You can take find out by taking the MEQ online here.
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This post is part of an ongoing Poly Land feature called Psyched for the Weekend, in which I geek out with brief takes about some of my favorite psychological studies and concepts. For the entire series, please see this link.