Influencer Lienke de Jong comes with a new book: Dear Good Morning. In it she shares her formula for getting up fit and energetic every morning. That sounds nice and well, but is it possible if you are an evening person by nature?
In Dear Good Morning, Lienke advocates an energetic morning. “My mission is to turn every Dutch person into a morning person. Together with various sleep experts, I made a step-by-step plan”, Lienke told EditieNL.
Benefits
She is convinced that morning people have many benefits. “They are ahead of evening people. Society is geared towards morning people. Morning people are fitter, happier and more successful,” said Lienke.
Lienke tries to motivate people to make good use of the morning and see it as a moment for themselves. “Do something that gives you energy, such as exercising or walking the dog. Then you have the benefits of getting up earlier and you have already exercised. It gives you a doubly euphoric feeling.”
Own transformation
She was also once an evening person herself. “I hated the morning. I hated it. Now I’m really a morning person. When I don’t exercise, I get really cranky. I think people should ask themselves if they are really a night person – in that case they are. hard to become a morning person – or that they just keep themselves awake with blue light from their TV or phone. ”
How?
Lienke’s roadmap in a nutshell:
Step 1: “Focus on your sleep. Get enough sleep.”
Step 2: “Get up earlier. I say out loud in the morning what I want to achieve that day. It really is a mindset. I follow the 15-second rule: after 15 seconds I have to be out of bed and throw in a splash of water. my face. Pat yourself on the back and compliment yourself when it worked out. ”
Step 3: “Go for a workout! It makes you feel fitter.”
Step 4: “Work on your motivation. Don’t say ‘yes, but I have children’ or ‘yes, but I don’t have time.’ I rejected all excuses for myself with a counter argument.”
Doubts
Chronobiologist Bert van der Horst has his doubts about the step-by-step plan. “Whether you are an evening or morning person is genetically determined, as is the length of sleep you need”, he tells EditieNL.
“You cannot become a morning person by simply getting up earlier. Just getting up earlier does not mean that you go to sleep proportionately earlier.”
Change chronotype
You can, however, train yourself to adjust your so-called ‘chronotype’. “You can try to shift your clock through the right exposure to light – a lot of (blue) light in the morning, little in the evening. But permanent adjustment is not possible.”
Morning or evening person?
About twenty to thirty percent of people are night owls. They go to bed after midnight, and prefer to get up again at nine o’clock. Another twenty to thirty percent of the population is morning people. They get up at six o’clock. And about half of the people are just in between. Source: Chronobiologist Niki Antypa from Leiden University
People like Lienke, who do manage to become a morning person, are probably people who naturally already have an average chronotype, or evening people who naturally need little sleep. “It would be nice to research that scientifically.”
Expectations from society
Night people can experience problems because of their rhythm, according to Van der Horst. “It is not that the economy is not set up for it: nowadays it runs 24/7. However, the problem lies in working and school hours: often between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.”
An evening person needs an alarm clock to get up on time. “That means that he or she gets less sleep, and that can eventually lead to obesity. In addition, we see that people who work in shifts – and therefore do not have a rhythm – are more likely to suffer from mental disorders, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. . ”
Age and time of the year
By the way, your chronotype can vary by age, he knows. “Young children are really morning people. Students often become more evening people.”
Summer and winter time also have an influence. “In the summer time we decide that we get up an hour earlier. That actually means that you have to get up earlier than your body would naturally want. For evening people, this increases the chance that they will sleep even less.
The video fragment can be viewed via this link
https://www.rtlxl.nl/Programma/editie-nl/15aa179c-a0c0-4483-b359-5d2a1c246431
Source and translated from Dutch: RTL Nieuws – EditieNL
