Waking up on time is training for life

Most mornings were tough. I wasn’t ever fully awake, but the office opened at 8:30 a.m., the staff would be there and I, as the boss, needed to show up on time and be ready along with everyone else for whatever the day might bring.

Nobody really cared that the school-board meeting the night before had struggled on until midnight. Maybe some trustees got to “sleep in,” but not the staff.

As a teacher, it had been the same. First class at 8:45 a.m., and I needed to be there at 8:30 or earlier and prepared for the lesson. No wearily making it up as I went along with those kids, many of whom had watched TV or played electronic games until the early hours.

Good thing I’d had some early training during university vacations. The window cleaning crew headed out to the first job at 7:30 a.m. sharp and if I was not in the van and on the road, the job would not have lasted.

Now I come to think of it, life has been a chronology of being on time and being ready.

The alarm clock became my friend. It was my oftentimes unwelcome friend at school, at play and at work.

Unfortunately, no lasting solution has been found for the conflict between 24-hour clocks and our individual internal biological clock. The 24-hour clock depends on uncompromising accuracy and predictability, while our biological clock, just like our biological everything else, seems to please itself in terms of our sleep and wakefulness.

Other systems, such as hunger, mental alertness, mood, stress, heart function and immunity also operate on a daily rhythm, governed more by our biological clock than the clock on the wall or on our wrist.

But as adults we have learned to deal with that.

Should you be tempted to show your biological clock who the boss really is, try flying out of Sydney, New South Wales, at 8 a.m. and arriving in Vancouver, B.C., at 8 a.m. the same day with 18 hours having elapsed in the meantime. Your biological clock will grind relentlessly on, paying no attention to the clock on the wall. It will be days before clocktime sleep, eating and ability to think will make any sense at all.

The point of all this is that trying to deceive your biological clock until it correlates with the clock on the wall is always a losing proposition. Necessity will govern your sleep and waking times.

Writer Michelle McQuigge, in the Victoria Times Colonist on Aug. 18 (Schools keep early starts), wrote an interesting piece about this, citing numerous studies from the United States and Europe that documented not only the effects of pervasive (and more often than not self-induced) sleep deprivation among teens, but also the effects that deprivation has on numerous aspects of their lives.

Lack of sleep, suggest the studies, has been linked to challenges with everything from academic performance to obesity to mental illness. The evidence was convincing enough to prompt the American Academy of Pediatrics to name lack of sleep as a public-health issue for teens and specifically name school start times as a factor.

Another study, this one published in the Journal of Sleep Research, found that the later the opening bell rang, the more time students spent in bed.

That finding would likely make more sense to the parents of teenagers.

Some school districts are apparently experimenting with varying opening times to coincide with student sleep needs. Good luck with that.

Teaching kids that it is OK to get up and get started when you feel ready is not the best preparation for later life — even for a career in window-cleaning.

And before I begin to sound too much like an old fogey (to which accusation I freely admit) let me say that, along with the rest of the world, I have had to forgo too many late nights, and risen early too many times in order to be ready for what the day would expect of me.

Somehow those expectations had no interest in how much sleep I’d had. That was up to me. It was called responsibility.

Being at school on time and ready to go when classes began is part of learning about that.

Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools. He wrote this for the Victoria Times Colonist.