Paul Vallely: Modern life is slowing us down

Workers may blame their phones when they clock in late, but getting up is hard because we do too much

The turn of the year was suspiciously digital. The date 1.1.11 sounded like some computer default code, and so it proved for many iPhone users. All across the globe there spread great consternation when, for the first few days of 2011, the alarm on the phone stopped working. People were late for work. In the United States, a waitress was sacked, and wrote to the chief executive of Apple Inc to complain. One man even missed his wedding, it was reported, though it turned out on closer inspection that he had merely missed a wedding planning meeting.

It's easy to lose sight of the basics here. The iPhone is a great little device for getting your emails on the move, acting as a personal sat nav, picking up internet radio stations, downloading games to keep the kids occupied in the car, and counting down the years, months, days and seconds since Manchester City last won a major piece of footballing silverware. But its reception as a phone is notoriously poor – and now it seems the £499 device can't be relied upon to get us out of bed.

That is not a secondary function. More than half the population now use their mobile as an alarm clock, a survey claimed as long ago as 2009, which is ancient history in digital terms. But there is nothing distinctly modern about the idea of the alarm, as some have suggested in the wake of the iPhone debacle.

The idea of determining the time at which we wake goes back at least as far as Plato, who, in the 4th century BC, was said to have a large water clock. The Romans certainly had something similar, and the ancient Chinese used water to power a clock which struck the hours.

The need to be awake before dawn dates back at least to the days of medieval monasticism when monks had to be at their prayers in the dark, long before the sun rose, to greet the start of a new day. Sonnez les matines, Frère Jacques was told by a confrère in the French nursery rhyme, evidently having fallen asleep on the night watch and failed to ring the bell for morning prayers.

For centuries, it was a mark of poverty not to be in command of your own timekeeping. Even as late as the Industrial Revolution, the huddled, shift-working masses had to rely on the knocker-upper man who would go from house to house, tapping with a pole on the bedroom windows. "Lying there at two o' clock, to hear the caller's angry knock, would give the devil himself a shock, as he lay fast asleep," to quote the words of a song by the Durham singer Jez Lowe, who has a gift for deftly enshrining dying folk memory in little gems of modern balladry. "A working man has not the right, to sleep his way all through the night. Oh cursed be the caller with his knock, knock, knock."

It is hardly an outdated lament. Most of us don't get enough sleep, and things are not improving. Britons have lost almost an hour's sleep per night during the recession, according to a survey by the hotel chain Travelodge. On average we are now getting only six hours 21 minutes a night. Two years ago, most of us slept almost an hour longer.

Partly it's down to hard economic times, in which people are kept awake by money worries or work stress. But many of us are staying up later and later watching television or surfing the internet. A third of British adults suffer to some degree from insomnia; some, in a self-fulfilling prophesy, even worrying about not sleeping .

And we should worry. Lack of sleep costs the nation around £1bn a year. Almost one in three of the population admit to having taken time off sick after a bad night's sleep. That amounts to eight million sick days a year – almost treble what it was in 2008. And insufficient sleep doubles the risk of heart attack, strokes and diabetes. It decreases the power of the body's immune system.

In babies, sleep is when the brain develops; as adults, sleep consolidates our memory, synthesises food into complex proteins, secretes growth hormones, refreshes brain cells with sugar and boosts the immune system. This is the sleep, as Shakespeare puts it, "that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care", as our body repairs itself after the wear and tear of the day.

Of course, we are not all the same in our needs. Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a night, as did Napoleon and Florence Nightingale. But generally, age determines how long you sleep. Babies need about 17 hours, children and teenagers between nine to 10 hours, and adults between seven and eight. Older people often sleep for only three or four hours, but then doze in the day to make up.

But lifestyle determines that. Hunter-gatherers still sleep on and off throughout the day and night. A siesta is programmed into human body rhythms, though modern cultures have learned to work through them. Some researchers have even claimed that the idea of a "good night's sleep" is itself a modern invention, bizarrely suggesting that in the pre-industrial era people segmented sleep with a "first sleep" after work until midnight, when people woke to socialise, followed by a "second sleep" until dawn. Either way, it seems that as a culture we have institutionalised sleep deprivation, which is why we need artificial alarms to jolt us awake.

There are, of course, smug types who claim that they don't need clocks, bedside radios or even mobile phones to awaken. I have several friends who claim to be able to wake at whatever time they have fixed in their brain the night before. But there is no getting away from the fact that, if electricity and artificial light changed our sleeping hours, more recent changes have seriously accelerated that shift.

The globalised economy and automated communications systems has brought round-the-clock working. Emails and text messages ping throughout the night, even if email spam has mysteriously diminished in recent months. Twenty-four hour entertainment, the city that never sleeps mentality, TV sets in adults' bedrooms and computers and games machines in children's bedrooms – all these are burning the candle at both ends.

Nowadays, with an excess of late-night diversions, bed only seems attractive in the morning, which is why it takes us, on average, 13 minutes to drag ourselves from under the duvet after the alarm goes.

We live in a world where time is an increasingly scarce commodity, one sage opined the other day. But there is precisely as much time as there has always been – 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. It is simply that television no longer ends with a vanishing white dot at 10pm, signalling that cocoa and the bedspread beckoned.

"Daddy, do you remember where you were during the great iPhone alarm calamity of 2010?" one wag Twittered last week, and replied: "No son, I was asleep".

Jez Lowe had a more poetic insight: "Clasp your dreams with all your might," he wrote, "because dreams will never keep."