Larks versus Owls – How Is It Helping You Professionally Or Not

Like the world around us, our biological clocks are set to tick in cycles of approximately 24 hours. We are designed to sleep and wake in cycles of roughly 24 hours, otherwise known as our basic circadian rhythm. Many of the body’s major systems run on circadian rhythms. Cardiovascular activity has a circadian pattern, as does body temperature, metabolic functions and liver and kidney function.

“Yet, it is increasingly common for people to override basic biorhythms and ignore the biological signals for sleep. Stimulation is available around the clock in the form of the internet, to name just one attraction. According to Dr. Roseanne Armitage, an expert on sleep at the University of Michigan, the sleep patterns of Americans are getting worse, increasingly out of phase with the natural rhythm. People are staying up later than ever and it’s happening at a progressively younger age,” wrote Psychology Today.

Moreover, as the publication shows, in addition to the body rhythms set to the day, there are other body rhythms occurring in cycles of shorter duration, often multiple times during the day. These are known as ultradian rhythms. “With these, too, biological and psychological alertness and performance are very strongly correlated to the synchronization of your actions with the body’s natural patterns. Staying in tune with your body’s cycles puts you in line to achieve peak performance. Failure to synchronize your patterns of activity and stimulation with your body’s natural circadian and ultradian rhythms puts a stress on the system,” added Psychology Today.

At the same time, as livescience.com points out, right from birth, our personal biological clocks are already wound. Genetics establishes a person’s “chronotype”.  “People span the range of those who are very early risers to very late setters, and this is genetically determined,” said Frederick Brown, a professor of psychology at Penn State, quoted by the publication.

Still, to a certain extent, behavior and environment can shift our built-in predispositions. But for those of us that are for sure in one chronotype camp or the other, in the end, the body decides. “If you’re a morning-type person, you can’t become an evening type, and vice versa,” said Brown, quoted by livescience.com.

Hormones and body temperature also differ between the sleep groups. Early birds have higher levels of cortisol in the morning, which may give them the perky edge. Our sleep preferences are at least in part hereditary. Differences in the CLOCK gene may contribute to differences in our favored times of activity. Sleep researchers at Stanford University found that people with one genotype had an increased preference for eveningness, while the other genotype had an increased preference for morningness.

When it comes to sleeping and working preferences, there are two main types of persons: “Larks” (love to wake up in the morning, that being the time when they are active and in-shape and go to sleep early) and “Owls” that are most alert at night, and typically turn in long after dark.

According to Paste Magazine:

Larks: Resilient and Realistic

Morning types show more conscientiousness, resilience and persistence. Larks are also more likely to be academically successful. These early birds “trust direct experience and observable phenomena; they prefer to process knowledge using analysis and logic,” say the investigators of a 2015 study of Facebook users, citing research by co-author Juan Francisco Diaz-Morales, Ph.D., M.D., of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Larks also tend to be self-controlled, respectful and cooperative.

Night Owls: Adventurous and Outgoing

On the other hand, attraction to evening is associated with intelligence, openness to new experiences, extraversion, risk-taking and impulsivity. Evening types may be more imaginative and intuitive, according to the Facebook study; research suggests they tend to be creative thinkers and innovators.

“A few studies show that character traits may differ between the diurnal and the nocturnal. A Spanish researcher found that the time of day we prefer to be most active corresponds to certain personality traits. Early risers were more likely to be logical and analytical, and likely to use concrete information as sources of knowledge, whereas those that stayed up late were more imaginative and intuitive. Another study published in the February 2007 issue of Personality and Individual Differences determined that night owls scored better on creativity tests than did intermediary and morning people,” wrote care2.com.

Here you can find some conclusions about both types, based on research and several studies done during the years.

The rise and successful growth of smart clothes​ and smart materials

The market for sensors and smart materials used in clothing will grow from roughly $212 million in 2014 to more than $1.8 billion by 2021, according to a new report from industry analyst firm NanoMarkets, quoted by advancedtextilessource.com. Smart clothing might finally evolve to become the computing devices of the future with watches and displays being printed on fabrics. However, the materialization of either scenario depends on the industry’s response removing the main barriers to mass adoption of smart clothing.

Google unveiled the results of Project Jacquard, the company’s interactive textiles collaboration with Levi’s. The project’s connected smart jacket combines innovative technology with a Levi’s-style jacket that is indistinguishable from anything else in the brand’s line. The jacket allows wearers to control music, answer phone calls, use GPS and more, “all by tapping and swiping on the jacket’s sleeve,” says Sarah Perez at TechCrunch.

As Deborah Weinswig for Forbes, while developers have often turned to handbags and  footwear to house clunky tracking and charging devices, advances in technology have begun to allow product designers to embed electronics directly into fabrics, enabling them to add connectivity to the kinds of clothing we are already buying. “The market for wearables will reach $70 billion in 2025, up from $20 billion in 2015,  according to IDTechEx, and  International Data Corporation (IDC) expects that 110 million wearable devices will be shipped in 2016 alone, up 38.2% from last year. IDC also forecasts double-digit growth through 2020, when shipments of wearables are estimated to reach 237.1 million,” she added.

According to  New Electronics, “The potential of smart fabrics is huge and recent research suggests the market, including fabrics manufactured with smart materials and those that use embedded sensors, could be worth more than $ 1.8 billion by 2021, driven by the IoT [and] developments in smart materials and in smaller, more powerful sensors.”

Researchers from across the US funded by ARPA-E – the research arm of the US Department of Energy – are developing clothes that can change their thermal properties to adapt to the environment and wearer’s body. By changing its make-up or shuttling heat to and from the body, the clothing aims to make people comfortable in a wide range of external temperatures. Heat energy can move in three ways: through conduction, whereby the atoms in materials pass energy to each other; convection, whereby high-energy atoms move through the environment; and radiation, whereby heat energy moves as electromagnetic waves. Clothing can control heat by changing how much radiation it allows to escape the body or how easily air can circulate.

Alon Gorodetsky’s team at the University of California, Irvine, is aiming to control radiative heat. “We’re drawing inspiration from squid, from cephalopods, that can do these amazing camouflage displays,” he says. Squid can modify how they reflect visible wavelengths of light, using a cocktail of proteins in their skin. The team is adapting the technique to longer, infrared wavelengths that carry heat. “We are leveraging that for materials that can regulate the thermal emissions of an object,” says Gorodetsky, who won’t yet reveal how his team implements cephalopod-like radiation control. His team is partnering with US firm Under Armour, which makes base layers for sports clothing.

Another great technology invention was brought by  Scough, a company from New York that created stylish scarves that filter and clean the air you breathe. The carbon filter included in the pocket is the same technology that the military uses to protect against chemical warfare. Now it protects you against flu and pollution.

Adidas launched a new “cool” collection,  Climachill. The brand managed to include titanium and aluminium into the fabric of the garments in order to give the wearer a cold sensation while working out. The technology developed by Adidas is quite innovative indeed since the chilling sensations are only provided when the body is warm. This enables longer training sessions and better performance for athletes.

Another brand that is innovating is  Cityzen Sciences,  a French company that started creating smart textiles 9 years ago. In 2013, they came up with what would be the prototype of a “d-shirt” (Digital T-Shirt) that proved successful, as the company won a prize in the “inclusive innovation” category at CES Las Vegas 2013. This shirt offers a large number of functions such as heart rate monitor, built-in GPS, accelerometer, altimeter,etc. Moreover, Cityzen Sciences is also running a project called Smart Sensing aimed at finding new features for smart textile.

Wearable Senses, a research unit of the Eindhoven University of Technology, is running a project about survival clothing. Jacqueline Nanne developed a concept of what should be the sweater of the future, using temperature and moisture regulation properties of wool.

Joanna Berzowska, professor at the Fine Art Concordia University of Montreal presented her  project at the  Smart Fabric conference of San Francisco. This project is aimed at including electronic or computer functions within the fibre of the textile itself. In other words, the ones of  Emily Essert,  “the fibres consist of multiple layers of polymers, which, when stretched and drawn out to a small diameter, begin to interact with each other”. The possibilities brought by this incredible innovation would create attributes such as garments that change shapes and colours on their own, or clothes that use our energy to charge phone.

Some labs have tried embedding tiny nanoparticles inside ordinary cotton thread so that they can conduct electricity. But they must wrestle with problems in making the material last a long time, as well as needing to use chemicals to bind the nanoparticles to the cotton. By contrast, Maksim Skorobogatiy’s lab, a physicist at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada, turned to the manufacturing process used to create the optical fibers that carry TV and Internet signals. The technique allowed the Canadian team to make new polymer-based fibers based on melting the preformed material to pull out a long, thin fiber shape. Such fibers can conduct electric signals.

No matter how long it will still take for all the new technology to be here for all of us, one thing is for sure: the future truly looks bright and shinny!