Feeling terrible after having to wake up very early and rush to work every single morning? While some might think that it’s most probably because we’re not familiar with the routine, it seems that science has proven otherwise.
According to Healthy Food House, a leading researcher at Oxford University, Dr. Paul Kelley stated that having to wake up and go to work before 10 o’clock in the morning is actually one of the most common forms of torture.
As a human, we have our own internal body clock or the Circadian Rhythm—which represents the biological timers that dictate the way our body functions. This genetically pre-programmed cycle regulates our perception of time, brain function, energy levels, and hormone production. Waking up early and working before 10 o’clock tortures our body and negatively affects the natural balance in the body.
Dr. Kelley explains that people can’t change their 24-hour rhythms or learn to get up at a certain time because our liver and heart have different patterns and they should actually shift two or three hours.
However, the 8-hour working day was introduced in the early 20th century along with the 24/7 factory productivity—and this was not established by taking natural human body clock into consideration.
As a result, Dr. Kelley claims that it affects the physical, emotional and performance systems—thus damaging the body. A week with less than six hours’ sleep each night leads to 711 changes in how the genes in our body function. He claimed that staff should start at 10 AM because many people are chronically sleep-deprived internationally and believed the effects of work will be drastically improved if we made simple changes in the time we start and end work.
Dr. Kelley and other neuroscientists point out the importance of understanding the functionality of the body at different ages—especially when it comes to sleep cycles. Sleep deprivation starts in adolescence as teens are biologically predisposed to go to sleep around midnight—so they aren’t really awake until 10 AM in the morning.
However, these teenagers are losing an average of 10 hours of sleep a week due to the strict early morning hour schedule of schools.
They also tend to stay awake longer into the night on weekends—so they had difficulty to constantly readjust to the early-to-bed, early-to-rise sleep cycle that is structured for a 55-year-old.
Dr. Kelley’s theory that school should start at 10 AM instead of 8:30 AM was tested on a British school and the grades of the students, their attendance and general productivity were significantly increased after some time. This indicates that incorporating such changes in all sectors of modern society will undoubtedly create a more productive, happier, healthier and less stressful environment.
Well, that’s the answer to our Monday blues that has been going on for the whole week. Share this article with your colleague and maybe bosses to let them know!
