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Chronotype quiz
The five-item reduced Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire (Adan & Almirall, 1991), scored 4 to 25, with a sleep, light, meal and training plan for each of the five categories. Nothing you answer is stored.
The questionnaire
Answer as you would if you were completely free to plan your day — not as your alarm clock and your working hours currently force you to live. That difference is the whole point of the instrument: it asks about preference, not about your current schedule.
Scoring
Add the five weights. The minimum possible total is 4 and the maximum is 25 — an unusual range that comes from the last item, which the original MEQ weights 0, 2, 4 or 6 rather than 1 to 5.
| Total score | Category |
|---|---|
| 4 – 7 | Definitely evening type |
| 8 – 11 | Moderately evening type |
| 12 – 17 | Intermediate type |
| 18 – 21 | Moderately morning type |
| 22 – 25 | Definitely morning type |
The five types
Definitely evening type
Left alone you would go to bed after 02:00 and wake around 10:00, and you would feel entirely normal doing it. Standard working hours ask you to live several time zones from where your body is.
Moderately evening type
You are slow and unconvincing in the morning, you improve all day, and your best work happens when other people are winding down.
Intermediate type
You are neither. Most people score here, and the practical meaning is that your timing is set more by your schedule, your light and your habits than by a strong internal preference.
Moderately morning type
You are a morning person in a way that fits an ordinary working week: awake in good time, at your best before lunch, and quietly done by late evening.
Definitely morning type
You wake early without an alarm, you are useful almost immediately, and by mid-evening you are finished whether or not the evening is.
What the instrument does and does not measure
The rMEQ is a self-report preference scale. It asks when you would choose to wake, when you get sleepy, when you feel at your best, and how you would label yourself. It does not measure melatonin onset, core body temperature minimum or anything else that a laboratory would call a circadian phase marker. It correlates with those markers well enough to be useful for planning your week, and nowhere near well enough to diagnose anything.
Two limits are worth naming. First, it asks about preference in a life you may not have: if you have worked early shifts for a decade, the honest answer to "when would you get up if you were entirely free" may be genuinely hard to find. Second, the score moves with age. It gets later through adolescence, reaches its latest point around the end of the teens, and advances steadily from there, which is why a family will often contain a 15-year-old and a 60-year-old whose scores are twenty points apart and who are both entirely normal.
This questionnaire is a preference measure, not a diagnosis. It cannot detect delayed sleep-wake phase disorder, insomnia, sleep apnoea or any other sleep disorder. If you regularly cannot fall asleep, cannot stay awake, or wake unrefreshed however long you sleep, that is a conversation with a clinician, not a quiz result.
How to use the result
The useful output is not the label, it is the gap. Compare the sleep window your score implies with the one your alarm clock actually enforces. If they line up within about half an hour, your schedule fits you and there is nothing to fix. If they are two or three hours apart on weekdays and you catch up at weekends, that gap is the thing worth working on — through light timing, meal timing and, where it is possible at all, a negotiated start time.
Sleep calculator — work backwards from the wake time you actually have, in 90-minute cycles. Sleep results — what the numbers from a night mean once you are tracking them.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the real questionnaire?
Yes. It is the reduced Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire (rMEQ): items 1, 7, 10, 18 and 19 of the Horne–Östberg MEQ, with their original weights, as published by Adan and Almirall in 1991. The totals run 4 to 25 and the five category bands are the published ones.
Does my answer get stored?
No. There is no database row, no cookie and no analytics event. If you have JavaScript on, the scoring happens entirely in your browser; if you have it off, the form posts, the sum is computed and the result is rendered in the same request and then discarded.
Is a chronotype a diagnosis?
No. It is a preference measure — a self-report of when you would rather do things. It is not a sleep disorder assessment, it does not detect delayed sleep-wake phase disorder, insomnia or sleep apnoea, and a low score is not a medical finding. Persistent trouble sleeping is a reason to see a clinician, whatever you score here.
Does it change?
Yes. Chronotype shifts across the lifespan: it becomes markedly later through adolescence, is at its latest around the end of the teens, then advances steadily with age. A score taken at 17 says little about the same person at 45, so re-take it every few years rather than treating one result as a permanent label.
Can I change my chronotype?
You can move your timing by a limited amount, mostly through light, and you can move your schedule a great deal. The instrument measures preference, not capacity: a late type who gets bright morning light and dim evenings will drift earlier, but will not become a definitely-morning type.
Source: Adan A, Almirall H. Horne & Östberg morningness–eveningness questionnaire: a reduced scale. Personality and Individual Differences 1991;12(3):241–253 · checked 2026-09-02
Source: Parent instrument: Horne JA, Östberg O. A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness–eveningness in human circadian rhythms. International Journal of Chronobiology 1976;4(2):97–110 · checked 2026-09-02
Find out what you actually sleep, not what you prefer
TempoLife reads your sleep from Health Connect and shows the real window night after night — the number to compare this result against.