If you’re a night owl, you’ll want to read this

Night owls may want to get to bed early tonight.

Those who opt to stay up later and sleep in may be twice as likely as morning birds to underperform at work and are linked to a heightened risk of early retirement due to disability, according to a new study.

Research published online in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine compared morning larks and night owls, the two types of workers in the office. A night owl typically stays up until late at night, or in the early morning hours, while a morning lark rises early and goes to be early in the evening. These types of monikers are what scientists call chronotype, or the pattern that dictates your natural sleep wake-time.

Prior research has been in favor of early birds; they tend to average more sleep, have a better work-life balance, and can even earn more money compared to night owls. Early birds also register better sleep quality because night owls typically have more trouble falling to sleep, hence why they stay up later.

As the study notes, chronotypes are largely genetic, but things can influence them, such as exposure to daylight, work schedules, family, and other factors. If you’ve noticed a change to your sleep and routine partners during the coronavirus pandemic, it’s likely due to living and working during a pandemic, a factor that could change the way you were before the pandemic.

For the study, researchers had nearly 6,000 participants born in 1966 in Finland complete questions about their work life and health and asked them about their sleep schedules to help better understand what their natural chronotype was in 2012. At that point in the study, participants — 6,169 men and 5,889 women — were aged 46, according to the study. Participants were also asked to rate their performance at work on a numerical scale.

When groups were compared, researchers determined that night owls suffered compared to morning larks: they tallied worse rating for every variable to sleep and healths and more often reported short sleep duration, insomnia, and high levels of social jet lag. They were also found more likely to be unmarried and out of work, according to researchers.

More than a quarter of men and 24% of women that were night owls suffered at work when they were 46, which was a higher proportion compared to morning larks or intermediate chronotypes.

In a four-year monitoring period, nights owls of both sexes underperformed at work and had a stronger link to a heightened risk of taking a disability pension. Male night owls were three times as likely to take disability compared to male larks, researchers said of the observational study.

Whether you’re a night owl or a morning lark, companies have started to let their workers adjust work around their clock in order to maximize performance. The New York Times reported in 2019 that Southwest Airlines and the United States Navy paid attention to their employees’ internal clocks when assigning shifts, while tech and financial companies implemented “core hours” for workers to come to the office during the middle of the day, but maintain their own work hours to however suites them. The move was designed to create a better work-life balance, according to the report.