Ahh to sleep. . . perchance to dream . . .
SHAKESPEARE'S Macbeth called it 'chief nourisher in life's feast', but Thomas Edison thought it was a waste of time.
Me, I'm with the murderous Scottish king on this one: Sleep matters.
I only wish I'd had more of it when younger, before the arrival of my child made it such a scarce commodity.
Margaret Thatcher famously required only four hours' sleep at night, and would work on her speeches through dawn, needing nothing more than the occasional nip of scotch for stimulation.
Thanks in part to Thatcher's reputation, a resistance to the allure of sleep has become associated with such metallic virtues as iron will, steely resolve and the presence of lead in one's pencil.
In Thatcher's Britain, sleep was for wimps.
Even without the help of the iron lady, in our siesta-less land, we have something of a puritan attitude towards sleep, tending to see early rising as inherently virtuous. When I was a teenager I was often woken before I was ready at the weekends. My parents saw time spent sleeping as time not doing exam prep.
I wish I'd known then what science tells us now – that teenagers need more sleep than children and adults and that the tendency to stay up late and rise late is a biological one.
The 'darkness hormone' malatonin is secreted in adults at about 10pm, but in teenagers at 1am.
No wonder I hated being woken early as a teenager, even more than I hate it now.
But there are signs that society is starting to accommodate the science of teenagers' body clocks, with a new experiment at a Tyneside comprehensive school, Monkseaton.
In an exercise overseen by scientists, including an Oxford neuro-science professor, lessons start at 10am instead of 9am. The school says the new timetable has helped to boost exam results and cut absenteeism.
Pupil Liam McClelland, 14, said he feels much better with the extra hour's sleep in the morning.
"I used to wake up and I was so careless in the morning: really simple things like pouring milk or something, I'd miss the bowl."
I remember the feeling well. (It still happens of course, but only after a bad baby night, or a particularly strenuous pub session, rather than as a matter of course.)
The neuro-science professor, Russell Foster, said teenagers have a biological predisposition to rise late, and may not begin to function fully until 10am, two to four hours later than adults.
If you talk to teachers, they'll say the kids are at their best in the morning. But Foster reckons this is an illusion.
He said: "What's really going on is that the teachers are feeling particularly awake by 9am and the kids are half asleep, making the class easier to control."
Another study found recently that hormones in teenager's brains make them more selfish.
Neurokinin B switches on puberty, making it harder for teenagers to imagine how others might feel.
I wish I'd known that when I was 16. Then, when my mum or dad woke me at 8am on a Saturday morning, complaining about my latest bout of deplorable behaviour, I could wave them away with newspaper stories explaining that it was all the fault of my teenage brain. And then go back to sleep.
awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk
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Weather for Batley
Thursday 24 May 2012
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