Chronotype and social jetlag: why sometimes you are tired not because of laziness, but because of someone else's schedule

Chronotype is not an excuse for any habit, but rather a natural tendency of the body to a certain time of cheerfulness and decline. Someone really enters a productive state earlier, and someone unfolds more slowly and thinks more clearly closer to the day or evening. The problem begins when the social schedule rigidly demands one rhythm from everyone. A person seems to formally live correctly, but his body constantly experiences a small time conflict.

This is what is called social jetlag. You have not flown to another time zone, but you feel as if you are artificially shifted to someone else's regime every week. On weekdays, you have to get up earlier than the body is ready to wake up for real, and on weekends, the body tries to recover from the loss. Because of this, Monday becomes a mini flight, and fatigue accumulates even in people who sincerely try to live a disciplined life.

In the conversation about biorhythms, this is also important because it removes unnecessary morality from the topic of sleep. Not every morning failure means irresponsibility. Not every evening lucidity is a harmful fad. Often, the body simply speaks its own language, and for years a person gets used to living as if this language should be broken, not understood.

Of course, the chronotype does not cancel the reality of work, study and external duties. But it helps to build a day more precisely: to understand when it is most difficult to plan, where to put more light, how not to increase your own lack of sleep, why sharp demands on yourself do not work as well as paying attention to a repeating rhythm.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of this subject is that it gives a person back a little cooperation with his own body. And this is much more productive than taking your natural pace for a personal flaw all your life.