Letting nature give your body clock a helping hand

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

I’ve often had a theory that, if you wanted teenagers to function like the rest of us, you’d need to move their clock forward by about three hours so that they’d think it was later in the day when they rose.

Either that or slip us quietly into the same time zone as Kuwait.

That way, they could party or play computer games until three in the morning believing that it’s just midnight – and then they could get up at 11am as usual, only now it would only be eight.

It mightn’t do the rest of us any harm either to shift by an hour or two because there’s something in so many of us that makes us reluctant to go to bed in time at night and disinclined to get out of it in the morning.

It helps of course that there’s a bit of daylight creeping through the curtains at this time of the year; there’s nothing worse than those winter days when you get up and come home under cover of darkness.

There’s a train of thought that suggests we’d function much better if we allowed our sleep patterns to be dictated by the outside world; we’d sleep more in winter, rise a little later – but come summer we’re up with the lark and full of vigour for the long day ahead.

That may or may not be true – but a recent study found that, whatever about waking with the sun, we’d function a whole lot better if we spent the odd night sleeping under the stars.

In other words, camping….in a tent.

As someone who has never slept under canvass – and indeed has never shown any inclination to roll out my bed onto the grass – this didn’t seem like the easiest way to changing the body clock.

But we must equally spare a thought for those who wrestle with their demons into the small hours, or who – as Christy Moore put in Delirium Tremens – would happily give a tenner to St Anthony to help them find some sleep.

This study – carried out at the University of Colorado Boulder – indicated that even as little as a few days in a tent could shift the average person’s body clock back by two and a half hours.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.