Starting work before 9am is torture, says sleep expert

MAKING people aged under 55 start work before 9am is akin to torture, according to one of the UK’s leading sleep experts.

Forcing staff to work 9am to 5pm left their bodies exhausted and stressed as a result of sleep deprivation, said Paul Kelley.

The Oxford University academic said it posed a threat to performance until the age of 55 when humans start needing less sleep.

Kelley said: “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 are not conscious of it because it reports to hypothalamus, not sight.

“This applies in the bigger picture to prisons and hospitals. They wake up people and give people food they don’t want. You are more biddable because you are totally out of it. Sleep deprivation is a torture.”

Kelley, an honorary clinical research fellow at Oxford University’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, said there was a

need for society to change work and school starting times to fit with the natural human body clock. Firms that forced employees to start work earlier risked hurting their output and storing up health problems among staff.

He told the British Science Festival in Bradford: “Staff are usually sleep deprived. We have 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.”