10 signs you’re a night owl and your intelligence peaks after dark

People who work late at night are often considered lazy.

Whenever we look for tips on how to be successful, it’s all but impossible to escape the advice that we must wake up early and all that.

Perhaps you tried to follow that advice, but only found yourself suffering from brain fog, and that might just be because you’re actually a night owl.

But you know what? It’s probably time you embrace it because it’s what works best for you.

Here are 10 signs that your intelligence peaks after dark.

1) You hate waking up

Or, at the very least, you hate being forced to wake up way too early. 

Everyone else might be up and at it at six, but you’d rather lie down until it’s noon if you could.

But of course, if you were to indulge in having such a queer schedule, you’ll have people calling you lazy and that you’ll never get anywhere in life.

You hate waking up, not because you actually hate waking up but because you really don’t get anything done in the morning anyway…and you were a busy bee a few hours before.

2) You’ve always had trouble with morning activities

If you’re to take a close look at your grades, you would see that you do worse with your morning classes.

And if you’re at work, you—and maybe your coworkers too—might have noticed that the quality of your output early in the day tends to be worse than what you dish out towards the end of your shift.

This is a common thing with night owls. 

Mornings tend to be when they’re worst simply because their brains remain half-asleep through most of the day.

It takes them all day to start waking up, and it’s only towards the end of the day when their minds are finally awake for once.

3) You would rather work the night shift

Lots of people hate the night shift because it goes against the daylight-biased schedule most of the world follows.

Their friends would be asleep, shops would be closed, and perhaps they aren’t fond of being awake late at night either so they always end up working tired.

But you, on the other hand, enjoy it and you look for night shift positions first when applying for jobs.

All the annoying quirks that come with living a nocturnal lifestyle don’t bother you, and you can simply think much more clearly at night.

4) You suddenly start functioning late in the day

You would spend basically your entire day struggling to get through your assigned tasks. Even something as simple as sorting numbers or proofreading your reports can seem almost herculean.

It’s almost like there’s just some kind of barrier keeping your brain clogged up and unable to think properly.

But then at some point late in the afternoon—perhaps even close to the end of the workday—that barrier just up and disappears.

Your head clears up and you can suddenly start thinking again. 

And all that work that had been giving you plenty of trouble? Easy as pie now, and you might even end up redoing all the work you’ve done earlier in the day!

5) Your best ideas come to you after dark

Your best ideas come to you after work, and not just because there isn’t any work left to distract you. In fact, your home might even be as distracting as your workplace is.

If you write novels as a hobby, nighttime is when you spin the best plotlines and write the best prose.

When your friends talk to you about their problems, you get told that you’re actually pretty insightful when the sun’s down.

You will certainly be familiar with tossing around in bed with your mind occupied with daydreams beyond anything you might have conjured during the day.

6) Caffeine is your lifeblood

Whether you’re sipping tea, drinking coffee, or guzzling energy drinks, you simply can’t live without coffee.

Many of us take caffeine early in the day to jolt our brains awake, but night owls tend to go harder on it than everyone else.

This is because night owls’ brains are simply sluggish at day, and don’t start functioning right until evening.

In the end, this habit results in night owls being almost immune to caffeine. They can drink it at any time without being afraid that they can’t fall asleep after.

And if you’re a night owl yourself, you might be used to drinking a few cups of coffee just before bedtime and then just falling asleep without any trouble whatsoever.

7) You’re used to staying up until sunrise

In times when you don’t have to worry about things like work, school, or obligations with friends, you would rather stay awake until sunrise if you can.

You might have even had a completely inverted schedule at one time, where you’d wake up at night and sleep at day.

This is because your mind knows when it functions at its peak, and the moment it knows it’s free to do so, would try to shift it to the schedule it prefers.

Other people would panic if they glance outside of the window and see that they’ve been awake for so long it’s now sunrise… but not you.

If anything, you can even say that pre-dawn is your favorite time of day, and you can’t help but be annoyed when your break ends and you have to face your obligations once more.

8) You’re traumatized by alarm clocks

You immediately get annoyed or even angry whenever you hear anything remotely like an alarm clock. 

You also have the same reaction towards being someone trying to wake you up, no matter what time it is.

The thing is that if your mind naturally just doesn’t work at all that well until nighttime, of course you would be inclined to stay asleep for longer.

But that is probably one of the worst sins you can ever commit in this daylight-biased world we live in. So you will have had people try to wake you up… and you’ve come to resent that.

And of course, you might also be quite familiar with being called “irresponsible” for snoozing your alarm or ignoring the people shaking you awake, which only adds to your resentment for alarms.

9) You have better focus at night

Daytime is horrible to you, it’s not just because you’re tired and cursed by brain fog through most of it. You also can’t seem to focus.

Your eyes skip over words, and your thoughts bounce around random, irrelevant topics even when there’s this one specific thing you want your mind to focus on.

Somehow you get by until night, when all of a sudden your mind just clears up.

You can’t describe why it happens, only that you can somehow manage to focus your mind better when the sun is down.

Suddenly, you’re no longer scrolling through tabs restlessly or trying desperately to calm your thoughts. You’re now in control of yourself for once.

10) You have trouble falling asleep

And it’s not just that you’ve suffered from insomnia perhaps once or twice. Being incapable of falling asleep at the “right” time is a consistent problem for you.

If you’ve ever tried to live a life according to the schedule a “responsible adult” is supposed to follow, your bedtime would certainly be far too early for your mind’s liking.

As far as your brain is concerned, it’s only just woken up and it’s at its peak. That you should try to go to sleep just then makes it go “WTF, are you serious?!” And so it won’t allow you to.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve drank chamomile tea or not. Your mind will be running a hundred miles an hour with ideas and stray thoughts until they quiet down enough to let you sleep.

Final thoughts

If most of the things I’ve described in this article describe you, then congrats—you’re definitely a night owl.

Your mind is at its peak during the night.

And so, if possible, you must maximize your true potential by working when it’s dark.

Unfortunately, the world is strongly day-biased, and society favors morning larks by a huge margin.

But that doesn’t mean night owls are broken, or that you need to change. Rather, society simply needs to learn how to accept and accommodate you. 

In the meantime, you’ll just have to find a compromise.