I didn’t know I had it, but it makes sense

As someone with a lifelong ‘early to bed and early to rise’ habit, I don’t mind admitting that my practice from the age of about fifty had been to rise on the dot of 5.24am, come wind, rain or shine. I didn’t even need to set an alarm clock; somehow it seemed I was programmed to awake at 5.24am and that was that – you could set your watch by me … that is, had you had been privileged enough to live, or sleep, with me.

Once I neared or reached sixty, however, I gradually found that I tended to wake somewhere between 00.30am and 2.00am.

Hearsay tells you that this was probably something to do with the waterworks of ageing men and needing one or more overnight visits to the bathroom – which may be partly true – but the rather more prosaic explanation is that I simply awoke when I awoke somewhere between the aforementioned hours and then ‘got on with it’ , which in my case consisted of rising and coming to my computer to begin what I called my ‘day shift’ (i.e. whatever it is I do as regarding email correspondence, blogging and trawling the newspaper/media websites for a period of between three and five hours).

These days, i.e. another five years on, my habits have refined themselves even further. I reckon I probably sleep about the same number of hours in total each day (five and a half hours to seven or eight?) as any normal person of any age that you might care to give as an example.

It’s just that I now carve up that total into a series of smaller periods of rest taken throughout the day. In the same way that if I’m hungry I eat and that if I’m thirsty I drink, if I detect a wave of tiredness coming over me, I simply announce that I’m going off to my pit for a ‘snooze’ (which terms in my case would cover everything from a twenty-minute catnap to an hour and fifty minutes of deep slumber) after which I’m good to go for the next few hours.

Add to which, by choice as much as the fact I have run out of things to achieve in any particular day, I usually retire to bed anyway somewhere between 8.00pm and 9.30pm latest.

It’s what you tend to have to do when you know that, as night follows day, you’re going to be waking again somewhere around 1.00am [see above] anyway in order to begin the following day … you know you’re only going to get around four hours of shut-eye in total.

Hitherto I had taken my ‘sleep’ life journey outlined above as being nothing more than the inevitable product of getting older.

Anyway, that older people sleep less is the wisdom of folklore, isn’t it?

That was, until today, when working my way around the website of the Daily Mail avidly (as I do every day, natch) I came upon the following article and realised that I’d got it all wrong.

I’m not – as previously thought – just an old git who increasingly gets confused and cannot possibly stay awake for more than three to four hours without needing to go for a lie-down.

In fact I’m living proof of a pinnacle of evolution for the human race – the senior elder who has to remain later to keep on the look-out for predators and threats from rogue states like North Korea.

See here for the full explanation – DAILY MAIL