Hajra Naz
Science has already established how Sleeping increases productivity. According to the Health Nut News, One of the UK’s leading sleep experts says that forcing adults to start work before 10 am is “tantamount to torture”.
Dr. Paul Kelly is an honorary clinical research associate at Oxford University’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute. According to him, sleep deprivation caused because of starting work before 10 AM makes your body exhausted and stressed.
Dr. Kelly talked about the need to change the time we start work and school as he believes that both toils begin too early.
Speaking to the audience at the British Science Festival, Dr. Kelly emphasized, “Your liver and your heart have different patterns and you’re asking them to shift two or three hours. We cannot change our 24-hour rhythms. You cannot learn to get up at a certain time. Your body will be attuned to sunlight and you’re not conscious of it because it reports to the hypothalamus, not sight.”
“This is a huge social issue; staff should start at 10 am. You don’t get back to [the 9 am] starting point until 55. Staff is usually sleep deprived. We’ve got a sleep-deprived society. It is hugely damaging on the body’s systems because you are affecting physical, emotional and performance systems in the body.”
“This applies in the bigger picture to prisons and hospitals. They wake up people and give people food they don’t want. You’re more biddable because you’re totally out of it. Sleep deprivation is a torture. This is an international issue. Everybody is suffering and they don’t have to,” .
According to a sleep expert, students in the UK were losing around 10 hours of accumulated sleep a week because of being forced to wake up early and start work. Dr. emphasized putting an end to early starts at offices, schools, colleges, and universities to “improve the quality of life for whole generations of adults and children.”
“At the age of 10 you get up and go to school and it fits in with our nine-to-five lifestyle. When you are about 55 you also settle into the same pattern. But in between it changes a huge amount and, depending on your age, you really need to be starting around three hours later, which is entirely natural,” he further elaborated his point.
Dr. Kelley, his Oxford University colleague Dr. Russell Foster, and Harvard Medical School professor Steven Lockley are heading a research study, called Teensleep. The study compares how students fare in schools with 9 am start times as versus 10 am start times.
“The science of it says they will perform better. They will sleep more, they’ll have less stress and anxiety, and a lower rate of drug uptake both legal and illegal. I can’t predict how much it will improve their GCSE results but I would put money on it being a statistically significant positive change,” said Dr Russell Foster
“Current [sleep] patterns increase the risk of diabetes and schizophrenia. It is no coincident that 70 per cent of mental illnesses starts between the ages of around 11 and 24. A societal change could see students improve their grades, and boost the health and output of employees,” Dr Kelly further asserted.
