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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. Sleep window of roughly 23:00 – 07:30, with a light plan, meal and training timing, and what to do when your working hours disagree.

What this result means

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. The rMEQ places you here on five questions about preference: when you would get up given a free choice, how you feel in the first half hour after waking, when you get sleepy in the evening, when you are at your best, and which label you would give yourself. Scoring 12 to 17 out of 25 means those five answers agreed with each other, which is the main thing a five-item scale can tell you.

What it is good for. Flexibility. You can move your sleep an hour in either direction without much cost, which makes shift patterns, travel and a changing schedule far less punishing than they are for people at the ends of the scale.

What it costs. There is no built-in signal telling you when to stop. Strong types get pushed to bed by their own physiology; you can drift later and later on screens and evening light without any obvious internal objection until the mornings start hurting.

The sleep window your answers imply

To land in this band you generally have to answer that you would get up between 07:45 – 09:45 given a free choice, and that you start feeling genuinely sleepy between 22:15 – 00:45. Put those two bands together with the eight or so hours most adults need and you get a free-day window of roughly 23:00 – 07:30.

That window is derived from the questionnaire, not from a study of people who scored like you, and it is not a target. Read it as a description of the preference your answers encode: it is where your sleep tends to land on a holiday, in the second week, once the alarm clock is out of the room. If your actual weekday window sits within about half an hour of it, your schedule and your body agree and there is nothing here to fix.

Light: the one lever that actually moves the clock

Timing is set far more by light than by discipline. The rule is simple and it is the same for everyone: bright light in the hours after your own wake time pulls your clock earlier; bright light in the hours before your own bedtime pushes it later. What differs between types is which of those two you need.

Your risk is drift, not mismatch. An intermediate type has no strong internal signal pushing back against a slow slide into later nights, so the clock ends up set by whatever light and habits you happen to have. That is good news: it means the same two habits work in either direction, depending on which way you want to go.

Practically. Twenty minutes of outdoor light in the morning anchors the earlier end; dimming the room and the screens two hours before bed stops the later end from creeping. If your mornings have started to hurt, do the first one. If you cannot get to sleep, do the second one. Doing both is what keeps an intermediate type where they want to be rather than where the winter puts them.

Meals

Meal timing is a second, weaker time signal, and the useful part is the boundaries rather than the exact hours. Two rules do most of the work: eat something reasonably substantial within an hour or two of waking on the days you want your clock to be earlier, and stop eating properly two to three hours before you intend to sleep.

An intermediate type has the easiest job here: a normal breakfast, a normal dinner two or three hours before bed, and no special rules. The one thing worth watching is the drift — a habit of eating at 22:00 will quietly pull the whole day later over months.

Training

Strength, power and endurance performance all tend to be a little better in the hours around your own personal peak rather than at a fixed clock time, and body temperature is a large part of why. For this type that peak sits in the a broad middle of the day, 10:00 – 17:00, so that is where a hard session will feel easiest.

An intermediate type can train at almost any hour without a large penalty, which makes the scheduling question purely practical: put the session where it will reliably happen. The only timing caution is the same one everyone has — a hard session in the last two hours before bed leaves some people too alert to sleep, and it is worth two weeks of testing to find out whether you are one of them.

When your schedule does not care what you scored

Most people cannot choose their working hours, and no amount of chronotype knowledge changes a 08:00 start. What it does change is which compromises are worth making.

Pick a schedule and hold it. Because you have no strong internal preference, regularity does the work that physiology does for other types. A consistent wake time seven days a week is worth more to an intermediate type than to anyone else on this scale.

You are the one who can take the awkward shift. If a rota has to include an early or a late block, you will pay less for it than the strong types will — which is worth knowing, and worth trading.

Check yourself every few years. Intermediate is the band people drift through rather than sit in permanently. If mornings have started to feel different from how they felt at 25, take the questionnaire again rather than assuming the old answer still holds.

A chronotype is a preference measure, not a diagnosis, and this page is general information rather than medical advice. It shifts with age — later through adolescence, earliest in later life — so treat any single result as a snapshot. If you cannot sleep when you want to, cannot stay awake when you need to, or wake unrefreshed however long you spend in bed, see a clinician; no questionnaire can rule out a sleep disorder.

Where to go next

Sleep calculator — put the wake time you actually have into it and work backwards through 90-minute cycles to a bedtime you can defend. Sleep results — what duration, timing and consistency figures mean once you have a few weeks of them. Re-take the questionnaire if you answered it as your schedule rather than as your preference; it is a common mistake and it changes the result.

The other four types

Frequently asked questions

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