Sleeping Habits and Personality: Night Owls Are Narcissistic?

Today Show: Sleeping Habits and Personality

There have been some new studies released that are quite telling of just how much your sleep habits can tell you about who you are as a person. According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, night owls may have a higher sense of importance, entitlement, and even narcissism.

Morning people aren’t exactly in for great news, either, because they’re more rigid, less adaptable with their body clocks, and less wealthy, according to a study by researchers at the University of Madrid. It looks like sleeping habits and personality don’t really share the best relationship with each other.

On the upside, a lot of creative types thrive at night, while the morning folks tends to excel at academics. It should be noted, however, that the researchers involved in these studies have admitted that the correlations found in the studies were rather small and the groups were generally college students, who tend to keep late-night hours anyway. When it comes down to it, though, maybe we could all just use a few more hours of sleep.

Famous Night Owls: Bill Clinton & President Obama

State University of New York professor Xavier Amador came to the show to talk about the studies, and said that he did think these studies, despite the admission of the researchers that the correlations weren’t exactly perfect, did have some merit.

There have been 20 years of research done about sleep habits and personality, but the fact is that, like these most recent studies, most of them have been on college students. There are a lot of determining factors in how much you sleep and when you get up. He did not think that you could profile anyone based off of their sleeping patterns.

Xavier Amador noted two famous night owls in President Clinton and President Obama. Again, however, though this study was interesting, he thought that there needed to be more done on different focus groups.