i am a NIGHT OWL!!!

— Jodie Hurt. Via [poppytalk]

Hahahaha! Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to stay up late. I remember having a bedtime of no later than 9pm on weeknights and 10pm on weekends and how I'd lay in bed, unable to fall asleep...just staring at the walls and up at the cottage cheese covered ceilings searching for faces & animals & cars, whatever...like a regular kid might do in the daytime while laying in the grass at the park doing the same thing with the clouds overhead!

Now, as an adult, I find myself with the same patterns, staying up well past midnight, sometimes to 2 or 3am and then wanting to sleep in till 10 or 11am. 9-5 jobs are NOT my friends! This morning, I was scanning over the news page and noticed an article entitled "Top Jobs For Night Owls". Hmmm...well, sounds interesting! The job list doesn't really matter. What I found interesting is that there is actually a scientific name for people like me! Here's the intro to the article:

"At 2 a.m., most workers are asleep in their beds, blissfully unaware that their alarm clocks will sound in a few short hours. But for 41 percent of Americans, this is the time of day when they are most productive, according to a 2005 poll by the National Sleep Foundation.

You can probably pick these folks out of your own office -- they're your co-workers who slouch into work, never a minute early but often several late, bleary-eyed and lackadaisical during the earlier part of the workday.

Some might call it slacking, but science calls it something else completely. People with severe night-owl symptoms may be suffering from Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, a condition characterized by extreme difficulty falling asleep before 2 a.m. and trouble waking early, according to the Sleep Disorder Channel. When people with this condition are forced to rise in time for 9-to-5 jobs, they are rarely at their most productive."

Okay, so next time I work on a 9-5 job and I get called into HR to be reprimanded for my 3 months of tardiness, I can recite "Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder" as my certifiably scientific reason! Hahah!