CHRONOTYPE QUIZ

What is your chronotype?

Your chronotype is the time-of-day rhythm your biology favors. This five-question screener — the reduced Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (Adan & Almirall 1991) — places you as a morning, intermediate, or evening type. Useful for scheduling sleep, light, and demanding work in line with your clock rather than against it.

This screener assumes your body still produces a clear 'I'm tired now' signal in the evening and a clear 'I'm alert now' signal in the morning. If you have chronic insomnia and don't recognize yourself in these timing questions — because your sleep signal feels absent, random, or stuck — take the full diagnostic instead. It's designed for that situation.

→ Take the diagnostic instead

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Considering only your own 'feeling best' rhythm, at what time would you get up if you were entirely free to plan your day?

What a chronotype actually is

Your chronotype is the time of day your body clock prefers to sleep and wake — not a personality trait, and not a habit you can decide your way out of. It is set largely by genetics and drifts predictably with age: most teenagers run late, most older adults run early. The five questions above are the reduced Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire (rMEQ), a short form Adan and Almirall validated in 1991 against the original 1976 Horne–Östberg scale.

The three types

Morning-type ("lark"). You wake early without much of a fight and fade in the evening. Roughly the earlier quarter of the population.
Intermediate-type. The largest group, with no strong pull in either direction — and the most room to shift a schedule without paying for it.
Evening-type ("owl"). You come alive late and dread early alarms. The type most often misread as having insomnia, when the real problem is a schedule fighting the clock.

Why it matters for sleep

A chronotype is not a sleep disorder, and a late one is not insomnia — but the two are easy to confuse. An evening-type forced onto an early schedule will lie awake at the "wrong" bedtime and feel wrecked at wake time: the same surface complaint as insomnia, with a different cause and a different fix. If your sleep is fine when you keep your own hours and only breaks when the alarm is early, you are probably looking at delayed sleep phase, not insomnia. That distinction changes what actually helps.

One questionnaire is a starting point, not a diagnosis. It captures preference, not the clinical delay seen in delayed sleep phase disorder, and it cannot account for shift work, jet lag, or a medication quietly shifting your clock. Treat the result as a label for a conversation, not a verdict.

Sources

Adan A, Almirall H (1991). Horne & Östberg morningness–eveningness questionnaire: a reduced scale. Personality and Individual Differences.
Horne JA, Östberg O (1976). A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness–eveningness in human circadian rhythms. International Journal of Chronobiology.