A news report from The Telegraph discusses internal body clocks and whether or not changing sleep patterns can positively impact health.
“Get up now and get in the car or, so help me, I will leave for school without you.’’ If, in recent days, you have found yourself resorting to this somewhat illogical threat to get a child back into the school routine, this week’s report that teenagers actually need to get up late will have come as no surprise.
Or perhaps you’ve been desperately glued to the duvet yourself. Back to work after a fortnight’s holiday, you will have nodded along with Dr Paul Kelley, an honorary clinical research fellow at Oxford University’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, who told the British Science Festival in Bradford this week that there was a need for society to change work as well as school starting times to fit with the natural human body clock.
Throw in the news that late summer-born children are at last going to be allowed to start school in the year they turn six, and you have to ask: is it time we rethought our whole attitude to time? Isn’t it madness to manipulate our clocks further through daylight saving as we will do once again in a few weeks’ time? Especially as there is a positive epidemic of insomnia, with one-in-four Britons suffering some form of sleeplessness. As Dr Kelley pointed out, sleep deprivation was used as torture in the past with good reason.
