Working nine to five is torturing sleep-deprived staff and making them ill
Adults should not start until 10am or later to allow for body’s natural rhythm, warns Oxford academic
FORCING staff to start work before 10am is tantamount to torture and is making employees ill, exhausted and stressed, an Oxford University researcher has claimed.
Before the age of 55, the circadian rhythms of adults are completely out of sync with normal nine-to-five working hours, posing a “serious threat” to performance, mood and mental health.
Dr Paul Kelley, of Oxford University, said there was a need for a huge societal change to move work and school starting times to fit with the natural body clock of humans.
Experiments studying circadian rhythms have shown that the average 10-year-old will not fully focus on academic work before 8.30am. Similarly, a 16-year-old should start at 10am for best results and university students should start at 11am. Dr Kelley believes simply moving school times could raise grades by 10 per cent. He was formerly a head teacher at Monkseaton Middle School, in North Tyneside, where he changed the school start time from 8.30am to 10am and saw the number of top grades rise by 19 per cent.
Similarly, companies who force employees to start work earlier are likely to be hurting their output, while storing up health problems.
“This is a huge society issue,” Dr Kelley told the British Science Festival in Bradford. “Staff should start at 10am. You don’t get back to (the 9am) starting point until 55.
“Staff are 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.
“Your liver and your heart have different patterns and you’re asking them to shift two or three hours. This is an international issue. Everybody is suffering and they don’t have to.”
He said that the body was attuned to sunlight and it was not possible to change its 24-hour cycle to learn to get up at a particular time.
“This applies in the bigger picture to prisons and hospitals,” he added. “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.”
Sleep deprivation has been shown to have significant effects on health. A week with less than six hours’ sleep led to 711 changes in how genes function, one study discovered.
Lack of sleep has been found to affect performance, attention and longterm memory and to encourage drug and alcohol use. It also leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, impulsive behaviour, weight gain, high blood pressure, lower immunity, stress and mental health conditions.
Tens of thousands of children are starting school at 10am in an experiment by Oxford to prove that later classes can improve exam results. GCSE students at more than 100 schools will take part in the four-year project based on evidence that teenagers are out of sync with traditional school hours. The findings are expected in 2018.