A workday should start at 10 not 9

Forcing staff to start work before 10 am is tantamount to torture and is making employees ill, exhausted and stressed, an Oxford University academic has claimed.

Before the age of 55, the circadian rhythms of adults are completely out of sync with normal 9-to-5 working hours, which poses 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 start focusing properly for academic work before 8.30 am. Similarly, a 16-year-old should start at 10 am for best results and university students should start at 11 am.

Dr Kelley believes that 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 day from 8.30 am to 10 am and found that the number of top grades rose by 19 per cent.

Similarly, companies who force employees to start work earlier are also likely to be hurting their output, while storing up health problems for staff.

“This is a huge society issue,” Dr Kelley said. “Staff should start at 10 am. You don’t get back to (the 9 am) starting point till 55. Staff are usually sleep-deprived. We’ve got a sleep-deprived society.

“It is hugely damaging to the body’s systems because you are affecting physical, emotional and performance systems in the body.

“Your liver and 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. 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’re 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’re more biddable because you’re totally out of it. Sleep deprivation is a torture.”

Sleep deprivation has been shown to have major impacts on health. Just one week with less that six hours’ sleep each night leads to 711 changes in how genes function.

Lack of sleep impacts performance, attention, long-term memory and encourages drug and alcohol use.

It also leads to exhaustion, anxiety, frustration, anger, impulsive behaviour, weight gain, risk-taking, high blood pressure, lower immunity, stress and a raft of mental health conditions.

Neuroscientists say teens are biologically predisposed to go to sleep at around midnight and not feel fully awake and engaged until around 10 am.

Dr Kelley said that almost all students were losing around 10 hours of sleep a week because they were forced to get up too early.

“Just by changing the start time you can improve quality of life for whole generations of children,” he added.

www.telegraph.co.uk