Jenny - I also like to sleep in, and I have trouble falling asleep and sleeping well at night...but...my experiences in life have led me to a different conclusion about it. I think that "early to bed and early to rise" is actually tremendously good for people...IF they can manage to do it. I can't most of the time, and nothing is happening that would force me to. I am self-employed, and my job does not require getting up early to get things done. I can get up any darned time I want to. Accordingly, I tend to stay up late and sleep in, and it messes up my system.

How do I know this? Well, I have spent some time now and then in ashrams (spiritual communities). While there, I go to bed at 10 PM like everyone else, and got up at about 5:30 AM to start the day. The day involves meditation, yoga, breakfast, lots of physical work, meditation, lunch, some socializing and free time, some more physical work, discussion, more meditation, dinner, and evening socializing and free time etc, final meditation, and go to bed...in other words, a very full and concentrated day, every day. What happens with a couple of weeks of that? I sleep great, I'm alert, I'm happy, I'm energized, I'm feeling great physically, everything is better.

So I know that early to bed and early to rise is good for my health, I'm just not disciplined enough to do it when I'm on my own! I'm not disciplined enough to get the exercise, yoga, and meditation happening much when I'm alone either. I really need that community life around me to keep me organized, it seems.

Nature designed people to be day animals. They're diurnal creatures. Their eyes are not made to see well in the dark, and they are not intended to stay up half the night. A day animal wakes before sunrise and settles down for bed around sunset. That is what human beings did for tens or hundreds of thousands of years...but we with our electrical lights and appliances have created huge artificial inducements to ignore our natural rythms, and it plays merry hell with our nervous systems in some cases (if not in most cases).

I am just like most modern people. I'm living a very unnatural lifestyle most of the time, and the price I pay for it is a disturbed nervous system and insomnia.

And I know it.

So. That's my theory. What do you think? ;-)