Nonsense. As an owl I have no problem sleeping when it's light.
There's research supporting my claim: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2010/02/1...
I'm 35, not exactly a teenager. The pilot study was published 3 years ago, comes to no firm conclusions and isn't yet backed up by a statistically significant study.
What it certainly does not say is that people who have had an owl pattern long beyond adolescence can be cured by leaving the curtains open.
Here in Canada, during the winter, I wake up at 6AM. I'm a bit of a early riser I guess. It's dark out. I end my work day around 4PM. The sun is already down, and it's dark. Being an early riser don't really help me get sunlight. That's my work schedule. I'm naturally a night owl. I prefer to work all night, but I can't. However, I'm also one of the few who doesn't care that we don't see the sun for month during wint…
Swedish here. I just hate the way things are set up, so that in the winter you practically don't get any sunlight at all. You go to work in the dark, work inside (not necessarily by a window) and then you go home in the dark. I would much rather shift the day so that the sun is up when I'm not at work. No wonder people get depressed.
Yes! But even with a free schedule, I have no idea how I could split it to work.
Counter-anecdote: I also tried to shift from my extreme night owl schedule to something more reasonable, particularly due to social reasons. I struggled with it for four years -- including dietary change, workouts and alcohol abstinence, and eventually gave up. I managed to get myself into the lark schedule three or four times for various periods of time (2-3 weeks minimum, about 6-7 months in the longest streak) but…
Consider sleeping with the curtains open, your circadian rhythm is sure to shift to a lark schedule then.
I used to, exactly for this reason. I otherwise have a fair deal of aversion to light (the first sunny days of spring are unbearable to me without sunglasses), but I tried to make sure there's plenty of light for me in the morning, as I knew it could have an impact over my circadian rhythm. Unfortunately, all that did was hurt my eyes when I woke up :-).