Sleep is one of life’s few unadulterated pleasures.

It’s in our sleep our subconscious mind, our real executive, manifests it’s life plans.

"Sleep on it" we’re advised. Why? Because it’s in this state we are able to piece together our cosnscious dilemmas and evoke their meanings and rational solutions albeit in a visual or semantic format.

Plus there’s no denying lying in bed feels pretty good.

But the puritans won’t let us lie without a healthy smattering of idle guilt.

"Your sleeping your life away if you’re sleeping more than 4hrs a night", Tony Robbins preached to the converted UPW congregation of which I was one. 4 hours? I was pushing 8. This was making me feel guilty.

If only I could sleep less. Imagine how productive I could be if I could get away with 3 hours a night.

We’ve all been there. And now I’ve just stopped fighting it. Apart from a few common-sense habits such as sleeping at a reasonable time and not using the computer or eating late, I’m sleeping and (importantly) getting up when I want.

When I’m not anxious about waking up at a specific time, I sleep better and often wake up early anyway. Early, I mean 7 am. My days of machoing out my coworkers by waking before 5am are long gone.

Sleep is a key part of our happiness and conditioning ourselves to get by on unnatural amounts of sleep carries long term implications for health and wellbeing.

Sleep is so important in fact that Tom Hodgkinson devotes the opening chapter of his excellent tome on doing less "How to be Idle" to the subject of sleep moreover, waking up late.
In particular how one wakes up naturally without an alarm clock. Yes, "alarm clock". Hodgkinson asks us to think on that very invention. Perhaps two of mankind’s mental jailers - the alarm and clock wedded in one frightening object.

Quoting Benjamin Franklin’s maxim "early to bed early to rise makes a man wealthy and wise", Hodgkinson reminds us how we have been conditioned from an early age by the social apparatus to associate late rising with non-productivity and guilt.

Hodgkinson cites Methodist John Wesley whose morning rise of 4am was swiftly followed by sermons on subjects such as the deadliest sin "sloth" being the murderer of time. Whilst we may find the analogies far fetched, we have done little to question the reality of our own society’s received wisdom.

We do, for example, now find ourselves in a society where long leisurely lunches that encouraged reflection, the building of relationships and perhaps a few beers being replaced by the 30 minute pit stop to refuel with anxiety - coffee and bread.

Perhaps it was anxiety associated with our inability to haul our ass into the gym everyday at 6am, because that’s the image I remember from the personal organizer advert "6am…Gym"

Perhaps it was my own earlier "issues" with enforced timing that creates the platform for this current thought train. Such was my inability as a teenager to wake that I regularly woke only 5 minutes before my ride to school. 5 minutes was obviously not enough time to get ready so I took to getting dressed, fully clothed in school uniform with tie before I went to bed.

The solution was ingenious and worked up until the point teachers smugly began to remark "Brown, for god’s sake, it looks like you’ve slept in your uniform" to the roar of the classroom.

Little did they know.

Yet if waking up early was key to our success how could Franklin account for all those struggling to keep their heads above water on the 0705 misery express to London Waterloo. Too tired to think about why they’re doing this in the first place and too scared by their freepaper about disease, terrorism, crime and market crashes to think there any consolation from taking their foot off the gas. An extra hour in bed is an extra hour of money lost.

Lest we forget Franklin gave us that great one liner "Time is Money".

Yet the contradiction inherent in the aphorism lies in its sell by date.

The days when time input equalled results output are gone all except for those performing menial labour such as farmhands, shelf stackers and most lawyers.

Results now come from the ability to take risks, creativity and making decisions not hours worked. Some of our most creative thoughts are seeded when we are lying on our back and staring at the ceiling. Having a good head on you is essential and sleep the purveyor of all mental clarity.

So here’s to turning our backs on the tyranny of peer pressure that glamorizes those who wake up before they go to bed. Thatcher slept only 3 hours a night I am often reminded. That’s exactly why we all need a good night’s sleep. Sleep well.