Deborah Watson, a director of a successful PR agency is an example of this. “Most weekday mornings I’m up before 5am. My family was always morning focused, dad ran his own business and for as long as I can remember he was out the door before 7.30am.”

Deborah’s father was the exception rather than the rule though. Ever wondered why the men in your office are unusually quiet before 11am? It’s because women are naturally the more ‘morning’ sex. A new study from researchers at Harvard found that our circadian rhythms run on average six minutes faster than men. Some women – more than one in three – have inner clocks that run especially fast. If this clock doesn’t get reset we get increasingly out of sync with the 24-hour cycle we live by. This means that women have to constantly fight against our inner ‘early bird’ clock, working throughout the evening to achieve all our family and work commitments instead of having an early night. But as much as many of us would love to be a morning person, it can have adverse effects too – women report insomnia 50% more than men and our faster clocks could go some way to explain this. Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School believes that this is a fundamental reason why women are sleep deprived.

Age, as well as gender, is also considered to be a contributing factor to how we deal with mornings. A 2002 study from the European Sleep Research Society of over 6,000 adolescents threeshowed that this is a stage in which the sleep-wake cycle tends to become delayed compared with children, who have fairly rigid body clocks. Christoph Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany, says chronotypes also evolve over a person’s life cycle: teenagers are classic evening types; then between the ages of 30 and 50, we are evenly split between morning and evening. People tend to become morning types in their 50s, whatever their previous preference has been.

The Science of Sleep

For both sexes, adult or adolescent, the exact time of day you choose to set your alarm can have a definite effect on your attitude to the morning. Studies show that it’s not the amount of sleep we’ve had that means we feel awake and full of energy – it can be dependent on the number of complete sleep cycles we’ve had, each of which lasts an average of 90 minutes (on 65 minutes of lighter sleep, then 20 minutes of deep, REM sleep, followed by a final five minutes of light sleep). Without an alarm, that would mean our body would choose to wake up after multiples of 90 minutes (so after seven and a half hours or nine hours, not seven or eight hours). That’s one of the reasons why we can feel groggy after an epic lie-in but wide-eyed and full of the joys of spring after a relatively short night’s sleep.

Indeed, we are also more likely to be full of the joys of spring during, well, spring and summer. Waking up to natural light increases our ability to drag ourselves out from under the duvet – our bodies are simply programmed to sleep more during dark, cold winter nights and until the invention of the electric light, we were mostly allowed to do just that. Think how much harder it was to get up on this cold October morning than on a sunny August dawn.

Mind Over Matter

For all the biology and evolution involved though, some of us – those seven out of 10 whose bodies are ready for action either early in the morning or late at night – have simply made the decision to be morning people, and to push their bodies and minds to get the most out of the day. Professor Cooper believes that personality is a driving factor: “Someone who is achievement-orientated is more likely to get up early than someone passive and laid back.” Just look at Condoleezza Rice. She gets up at 4.30am every day to work out but admits it isn’t easy. “I’m not an automaton,” she has said. “I don’t wake up every morning thinking, ‘Oh yeah, let’s go!’ I have to push myself.” Studies have shown correlations between our chronotype and our personality, showing evening people to be creative, intelligent but often neurotic, whereas morning people are generally more agreeable, optimistic, conscientious and satisfied with life.

Nicola Mendelsohn, executive chairman of ad agency Karmarama and president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising believes being an early riser is part of her personality. “I wake up immediately at 6am, no matter what time I went to bed and it only takes me 20 minutes to get out of the house. But I think that’s a mental attitude. It’s all about making use of every moment and getting as much into the day as possible.”

It’s easy to feel like an underachiever when you’re not a morning person. We’ve all got one friend who has applied a perfect face of make-up fired off her first 20 emails of the day and finished a presentation before we’ve even had a shower – and the uncomfortable truth is, she may well get promoted quicker than her bleary-eyed colleagues. Research by Christoph Randler published in the Harvard Business Review, showed that morning people get better grades in school then go to better colleges, which leads to better job opportunities. They also “anticipate problems and try to minimise them,” which is a useful trait in the workplace.

How to become a morning person