WHY DO CHILDREN WAKE EARLY? DON’T WORRY ABOUT STAYING AWAKE

out of sync with the outside world, and with each other, you are in trouble.

Not only will you struggle to sleep, but you will get hungry, have problems controlling your blood sugar levels, feel run down and tired, and find it hard to concentrate.

It’s called ‘social jet lag’, because just like the jet lag you experience after travelling across multiple time zones, it leaves you feeling terrible.

A BIg study of 25,000 people of all ages found that while most children are larks, they become progressively more owlish through the teenage years, hitting maximum ‘owl’ at around 20.

They try to sneak their phones up to their bedrooms, stay up late chatting to their friends on social media and are hard to rouse in the morning.

They grunt at breakfast, refuse your healthy offerings and instead buy junk food and energy drinks on the way to school to wake themselves up.

This behaviour might be really annoying but, to some extent, it’s not their fault. Puberty shifts the internal clock to a later setting, by an average of one to two hours.

So an angelic child who was once quite happy to go to bed by 9.30pm and get up at 7am (getting the necessary ten hours in bed) suddenly morphs into a stroppy teenager who resents being sent to bed at all and resents even more getting up at 7am, after having managed less than seven hours’ sleep.

There are clear gender differences too. girls, who tend to hit puberty earlier than boys, start turning owlish earlier, reaching ‘maximum owl’ at 19, before slowly becoming more larkish.

Boys, on the other hand, have a body clock that tends to get them to bed later and later, until they hit the age of 21 and have to fit into the adult world. Nonetheless, they tend to remain more owlish than women until they hit their 50s, when gender differences disappear.

This might cause conflict at home, but perhaps this is what nature intended.

When kids are young, it is vital that their parents nurture and look after them. But as they grow older, they need to start to assert their own identity, to prepare for life outside the parental home, where they will have to fend for themselves.

Staying up late, with other teenagers, while the parents are all asleep, may be nature’s way of bonding the next generation together.

ONe of the main things that keeps people awake at night is worrying about staying awake and the terrible consequences of not getting to sleep.

Thoughts like: ‘I won’t get to sleep and if I don’t then I will feel really tired at work tomorrow and get the sack.’

It’s important to realise that these thoughts are not real. Try giving your negative thoughts a name, like ‘Donald’.

So when you have them you can say: ‘That is just Donald sounding off again.’

Challenging yourself like this sounds crazy, but it works.

Another way of approaching your catastrophic or negative thoughts is by imagining what a sympathetic friend would say to you if you were to share them. What would they say? How would they help to ground you?

It is also important to realise that at night your filters are down, and you are more vulnerable to inner demons, so any thoughts you might have at night will inevitably be less rooted in reality than the negative thoughts you have during the day.

But once your sleep improves, you will find those negative thoughts easier to stamp out.

quicker way to convert yourself to a lark could be to go camping. A few years ago a U.S. researcher sent eight people on a camping trip with wrist monitors to record how much light they were being exposed to, and activity monitors tomeasure how much sleep they were getting. During the week they were away camping, they were not allowed torches or mobile phones, and the only light they saw at night was from candles or the campfire. because they were living outdoors, their monitors confirmed that over the course of the week they were exposed to four times their normal levels of light.

This had a big effect on their sleeping patterns and their sleep fell into closer sync with sunrise and sunset. Before the trip, their average bedtime was 12.30am; by the time they got home it was more like 11pm.

Blood tests showed their bodies had started to release melatonin two hours earlier than they had before the trip — they had turned from owls to larks in just one week.