Dr Michael Breus discusses four chronotypes, including lions, dolphins, bears, and wolves, he has identified to classify sleep behaviors with the Daily Mail.
During my 15-plus years as a sleep doctor, I’ve seen hundreds of patients struggle with seemingly intractable sleep problems — and all the knock-on effects on relationships, careers and health — as a direct result of what I call chrono-misalignment, or the disruption of our personal biological clocks.
For 50,000 years we’ve kept perfect bio-time, but in the past 125, all the technological advances of modern life — artificial light, air travel, instant communication, caffeine — have knocked the natural rhythm of our biology horribly out of sync.
The good news is it doesn’t take much to get our clocks back on time. All it needs is just a few tweaks to our lifestyle and schedules — changing the hour we drink our first cup of coffee, for example; when we nap; when we have lunch and so on.
And that’s the beauty of it: you don’t have to overhaul your life entirely to reap the enormous benefits of a return to your correct bio-time — benefits that include losing weight, becoming more creative, solving problems, improving mood and, of course, getting a better night’s sleep.
