Formation and Sleep Ethics

One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is how choosing bad sleep and rest patterns is choosing to make it more likely that we behave less graciously than we might otherwise. There is research, now, to back that up:

if you don’t get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to engage with unethical and deviant behaviour, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts.  -Disrupted sleep article

So, contrary to some medieval asceticism, we should probably not normally be skimping on sleep.
It does, however, make me wonder what the purpose of sleep deprivation regimes was in those medieval regimes. I have the impression (but without researching it further) that it may have had something to do with avoiding sloth; that lying a-bed was seen as sinfully lazy. But I also wonder whether for some at least, there was a sense that we do indeed tend to worse self-censoring and self-checking when we are tired, so the point in that case may have been to push themselves more closely to their limits to make the testing of benevolence etc more real and more frequent, to give more chance to practice.
If that was the case, then I have to say that I wonder whether that is not, in fact, putting God to the test .... more thought needed.

Teenagers need 11am lie-in

The initial research is a few years old now, but more recent classroom research has borne it out and one school is taking action on it. "... research carried out by Professor Foster showed that, from the age of 10, our internal body clocks shift, so it's good for young people to stay in bed. They peak at 20 then gradually go back again, but body clocks do not reach the pre-teenage level until around 55 years old. The 'time shift' is two hours on average, so teenagers should get up two hours later. We are making teenagers ratty by making them get up early."
While I'm quite willing to believe this, what I don't get is how this relates to our ability to shift our body clocks when we travel to different time zones. I presume that perhaps it's to do with how the body regulates the sleep hormone in relation to daylight. It would also explain how come evening services are a better bet for teens and twenties than morning. You see? We knew it all along!
Teenage pupils deserve 11am lie-in, says head | Education | The Observer:

More on naps and learning

It was discovered that, across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for those subjects that strongly acquired the tasks during the training session.

"These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory," said Dr. Tucker. "The importance of this finding is that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well."

I should note too that the figure in the article is 45 minutes of REM sleep. This isn't necessarily the 10 minute power nap but rather a siesta. Not quite my definition of "brief" as stated in the opening sentence of the article but clearly not a full-on sleep session.

Naps Help Your Memory, New Study Suggests

A report of some research on the effects of napping on learning shows that 90 minute siestas may be a good thing at consolidating 'how to' learning. This article gives the outline details: Naps Help Your Memory, New Study Suggests: "if you need to memorize something quickly or if your schedule is filled with different activities which require learning 'how' to do things, it is worth finding the time for an afternoon nap."
I'm just wondering whether I should throw that into the review of how we organise the college day ... !?

You Can't Make Up For Lost Sleep

For those who have ministered among students, and even ministered overlong weekly schedules, this research calls us to honour sabbath in the daily as well as the weekly routine. "Chronic partial sleep loss of even two to three hours per night was found to have detrimental effects on the body, leading to impairments in cognitive performance, as well as cardiovascular, immune and endocrine functions. Sleep-restricted people also reported not feeling sleepy even though their performance on tasks declined."
It's that latter that is concerning: those who have charge of organisations that could affect the welfare of many or even the country definitely should not be working under sleep deprivation conditions. Yet the machismo of our working culture seems to encourage it to happen... Even worse, it infects some church leadership circles.
ScienceDaily: Chronically Sleep Deprived? You Can't Make Up For Lost Sleep