Forget the 5am starts! Night owls like me possess the real secret of success | Arwa Mahdawi

A new report suggests self-declared night owls tend to have higher cognitive scores. So please can we now ditch the lazy and undisciplined stereotypes?

My fellow night owls, grab a strong cup of coffee and gather around: I have great news. For a long time, our kind has been unfairly maligned. Stereotyped as lazy and undisciplined. Told we ought to be morning larks. Advised to go to bed early so we can wake before 5am and run a marathon before breakfast like all high-flyers seem to do. Now, however, we are having the last laugh. Science has officially crowned us superior to our early-rising brethren.

OK, it may be a tad more complicated than that. A study published last week, which you may have already seen while scrolling at 1am, suggests that staying up late could be good for brain power. Is this study a thinly veiled PR exercise conducted by a caffeine-pill company? Nope, it's legit. Research led by academics at Imperial College London studied data on more than 26,000 people and found that self-declared night owls' generally tend to have higher cognitive scores". And we are talking quite a lot higher. Evening types ... scored about 13.5% higher than morning types in one group and 7.5% higher than morning types in another group", according to a write-up of the study.