From Financial Times: 'Social jet lag' causes fatigue and illness (also on MSNBC):
Half the people in modern urban societies suffer from "social jet lag" because their body clocks are seriously out of step with their real lives, the Euroscience forum in Munich heard on Monday.
The result was chronic fatigue and an increased susceptibility to disease, researches found. They concluded that employers should tell staff to wake up in their own time and come in to work when they feel ready to.
Till Roenneberg, a circadian rhythm researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, coined the phrase "social jet lag" after a survey of 40,000 people in Germany and Austria - and a more detailed follow-up study of 500 - showed a persistent mismatch of at least two hours between their biological clocks and the demands of their jobs or education.
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One striking research finding was that people suffering from social jet lag were much more likely to smoke. "Among those who had no social jet lag, 10 per cent smoked; at two hours the proportion was up to 30 per cent and at four hours we found 60 per cent smoked."
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Employers and schools could do a lot to help, by adjusting their working hours, said Martha Merrow of Groningen University in the Netherlands. "Schools should open later; I think 10am would be sensible but no one wants the inconvenience of making the change."According to Prof Roenneberg, "those people who suffer the least social jet lag are late types who can choose their own working times. Employers should say: 'Please wake up in your own time and come in when you are ready.'"
Computer-mediated work and networks, which bring groups together on radically different schedules than the 19th and 20th centuries' work habits. We have an opportunity to rethink the organization of work. Should we start with recognizing schedules in shared workspaces need to be more flexible? I think so, especially when you consider that more work can be done at home, allowing people to spend time with their families and contribute to the raising of the next generation while continuing intense professional engagement with the economic world.
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I believe there have been studies on teenagers that indicate they would do better with later school starts. There was talk in British Columbia a few years ago about implementing later start times for high schools but it went nowhere as many teachers and parents thought it too disruptive to their routines.
With regard to the apparent correlation with smoking, has it been ruled out that smoking is the effect rather than the cause?
Our current work schdules have little to do with needs of individual humnas but were largely developed to accommodate the changes brought about by the industrial revolution(s. In ohter words it was "forced" on to workers by the employer. I agree that we now have an opportunity to change this however it will be difficult to do since the employer is less likely to see a strong incentive. There may be enhanced productivity which, if demonstrated, could encourage employers to support changes. In my expereience even employers that offer "flex hours" limit it to coming in an hour later or earlier.
I'm something of a night-owl myself; and I suspect that a later school starting time would simply mean that students would stay up later. Perhaps it would be better to just go to bed 2 hours earlier? If I stayed up to whenever I wanted and got up whenever I wanted, I'd soon be sleeping all day and staying up all night.
Going to bed two hours earlier is no good if you can't fall asleep during that time. I was so happy when I started college and didn't have to take 8 am classes like in high school! Also, I know I've done better at jobs where I could arrive between 9:30 and 10:30 (and stay correspondingly later) -- that just seems to be when my brain turns on. :-)
Agree in principle. But having academic or professional jobs, it's easy to forget that most jobs are really constrained when it comes to starting and ending times.
In manufacture and process industries, for example, flex time is not really doable since your job needs to be done in tandem with everybody else. And in jobs like outdoor construction and farming, you're fairly dependent on daylight - which at northern or southern latitudes is in short supply as it is for half the year. I suspect most people working on a high-rise construction site prefers working in bright, even natural light to fitful, contrasting sodium lamps hiding obstructions and casting heavy shadows across every drop, given the choice.
The authors were quite specific about clerical/informatics jobs. They are aware that some jobs e.g., manufacturing, cannot be times according to individual preferences, but there are less and less such jobs, and more and more office/computer concole jobs out there. "Got o bed earlier" does not work for adolescents - go to tis post and click on the three links within it for more information.
One confounding variable here is the electric light bulb. Night is no longer so drastically limiting, which is bound to keep some of us up later -- there is just so much to do at night these days. Without the electric light bulb lighting up our nights, I'd bet that most everyone would go to bed eariler naturally.
So it's hard to say that late sleep habits are "natural" or better for some.
No matter how early I go to bed, waking up before 8 am is painful for me. Everybody always calls me lazy because of this.
I discovered that swing shift was my most productive hours.
Now I have a job where I have manged to set my hours n 11am to 7pm. I am very happy with that.
During vacation times or times when I have not worked for someone else the rhythm I fall into is sleeping midnight- 8am. Most productive 9am - 1pm, nap/siesta, and productive again 3pm until about 11pm. Of these two periods, 9am-1pm is best for creativity, planning, and envisioning the future, (i.e. - creating plans and checklists) and 3 - 11pm is good for executing prior plans, and chunking out work (i.e. - accomplishing plans and checking items off the checklist).
Notice that I have 12 productive hours on my natural schedule, whereas if I force myself to get up early and have no nap, I'm pretty much spent after 9 hours (I may still be awake, but I am not as creative or efficient).