Does Early to Bed, Early to Rise Really Make You Healthy, Wealthy and Wise?
Researchers at the Imperial College of London are raising questions about the long held theory that everyone does their best thinking in the morning. The study questions the conventional “early to bed, early to rise” wisdom popularized by Benjamin Franklin and others.
| 31 Oct 2024 | 11:52
Benjamin Franklin was a big proponent of rising early and getting to work. But now British researchers say that some people are more alert in the later part of the day. (
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As the clocks changed with the end of Daylight Saving Time on November 3, giving us an extra hour of sleep it also renewed an ageless debate as to whether hitting the hay early and waking up with the sun is the best way to face the day. One new study out of London is questioning that long held belief.
The conventional wisdom goes back centuries. Benjamin Franklin included the proverb “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise” in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1736. In fact, the phrase actually popped up nearly a century before in a collection of proverbs for children published by Brit schoolmaster John Clarke in 1639. And there are close approximations of the fold advice in some Middle English books as far back as the 15th century.
What the two gentlemen who embraced the proverb had in common was living in a time when many common folk worked the land and getting up with the sun and going to bed when it set made for a workable day.
But a bunch of British researchers at Imperial College London have a different message: Fuhgeddaboudit. They say some people are more alert and creative later in the evening. The key factor may be total hours of sleep, rather than time of day that one sleeps.
Pouring over data collected by UK Biobank, a resource containing genetic, lifestyle and health information for more than half a million Brits, they zeroed in on one study of more than 26,000 people who had completed intelligence, reasoning, reaction time, and memory tests. The object: to find out how sleep and chronotype (translation: definition of what time of day you feel most alert) affected brain performance.
Surprise! Night owls who stay up late scored higher on cognitive function. And late bedtime seemed a strong link to creative ability for such celebrated night owls from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and James Joyce to Lady Gaga.
Naturally there were caveats. What truly mattered was how long and well the late nighters slept. Politicians like Winston Churchill and former president Barack Obama may boast of thriving on little sleep as does home entertainment diva Martha Stewart. But in the British study, those getting between seven and nine hours of shut-eye each night did best in cognitive tests. As the lead author Dr Raha West is quoted on the Guardian website: “While understanding and working with your natural sleep tendencies is essential, it’s equally important to remember to get just enough sleep, not too long or too short. This is crucial for keeping your brain healthy and functioning at its best.”
Some outside experts did note the need to look a bit harder at the findings. Because the aim was to challenge stereotypes regarding sleep times, the research did not consider personal characteristics such as education or health problems such as depression or anxiety, nor did it pin down the time of day the tests were run. Jacqui Hanley, head of research funding at Alzheimer’s Research UK, put it best. “Without a detailed picture of what is going on in the brain, we don’t know if being a ‘morning’ or ‘evening’ person affects memory and thinking, or if a decline in cognition is causing changes to sleeping patterns.” In other words, for the moment, if morning is best for you, go for it. If you’re smarter at night, fine. But either way keep a consistent schedule. As all agree, shifting hours affects the quality of your sleep.