Any night owls reading this will be familiar with the struggle of constantly trying to fit into a morning person’s world. And researchers might have finally identified the genetic typo that causes this social jetlag.

A 2017 study revealed that many people who stay up late and struggle to wake up in the morning aren’t lazy, their internal clock is simply genetically programmed to run between 2 and 2.5 hours slower than the rest of the population, thanks to a mutation in a body clock gene called CRY1.

“Carriers of the mutation have longer days than the planet gives them, so they are essentially playing catch-up for their entire lives,” said lead researcher Alina Patke from The Rockefeller University in New York.

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