September sleep deprived? It’s knocking down your IQ!

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s the first Monday of the September grind, which means many of you are already being ground down by busy schedules and a lack of sleep.

So who wouldn’t love the results of a recent study by a British researcher suggesting we need to adjust our work and school days for a later start?

Dr. Paul Kelley of Oxford University is calling for a huge societal change so our schedules better fit with the natural body clock of humans.

Kelley contends that forcing staff to start work before 10 a.m. is tantamount to torture and is making employees ill, exhausted and stressed, with his research suggesting that circadian rhythm of anyone under the age of 55 simply isn’t isn’t geared for earlier starts.

But not everyone agrees.

UBC sleep expert and psychology professor Dr. Stanley Coren calls Kelley’s findings “nonsense.”

“Different people have different rhythms. Psychologists tend to divide people into what we call larks and owls,” he tells NEWS 1130.

“Larks are people who get up early in the morning, they twitter around, are fairly functional — and by early evening, they are pooped. And then you have the owls who are slug-a-beds and it takes a long time for them to get going late in the morning before they are really starting to function at all. But they go on through the late hours of the night perfectly happy.”

Coren claims the Oxford study makes a very broad statement, based upon the presumption everyone is the same.

“Furthermore, it changes over time. When we are younger, we all tend to be a bit larkish. When we hit puberty, we are owls. As you grow older, you become larkish again,” he argues.

“The big problem here is the researcher is basing his findings on research done mostly on university students. They are still in that owlish state.”

But Coren — who is also the author of Sleep Thieves — does agree that sleep deprivation is causing big problems for our society.

“It is making us clumsy, stupid, unhappy, and dead. Biologically, we are programmed to have somewhere in the vicinity of 10 hours sleep out of every 24. It doesn’t have to be continuous, but that’s how we are programmed. Nowadays, we are averaging seven to 7.5 hours.”

Unless we have a chance to “sleep it out” on weekends, the negative effects of sleep deprivation also build up over time. Psychological tests have found that less than eight hours of sleep per day translates into at least a one point drop in IQ scores.

“It happens in a whole bunch of tests — things like short-term memory and your ability to order things logically,” says Coren. “And then for every hour below seven, you lose effectively two points worth of IQ.”

So if you get less than seven hours of sleep a night over a week, Coren contends that you would lose in the neighbourhood of 15 IQ points.

“For a normal person with an IQ of 100, that would knock them down to 85. That’s going to cause blunders and mistakes.”