The average Briton gets six-and-a-half hours of sleep a night, according to the British Sleep Council. It has been known for some time that the amount of sleep people get has, on average, declined over the years, while the rates of obesity and diabetes have soared. Could the two be connected?

A study at the University of Surrey’s Sleep Research Centre revealed that most of the subjects struggled with mental agility tasks when they had less sleep, but the most interesting results came from the blood tests that were run. Dr Simon Archer and his team at Surrey University looked at the genes that were switched on or off in our volunteers by changes in the amount that we had made them sleep. Overall there were around 500 genes that were affected, some of which were going up, and some of which were going down.

What they discovered is that when the volunteers cut back from seven-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours’ sleep a night, genes that are associated with processes like inflammation, immune response and response to stress became more active. The team also saw increases in the activity of genes associated with diabetes and risk of cancer. The reverse happened when the volunteers added an hour of sleep.

The message from this experiment was that if you are getting less than seven hours’ sleep a night and can alter your sleep habits, even just a little bit, it could make you healthier.

This is all very well and assumes that you can, at will, determine to have set amounts of sleep, say seven hours. What happens if you can’t go to sleep at all, or maybe for only two hours? How do you cope with the fact that every so-far known remedy tried stops working in short order, and that pharmaceutical drugs often have side effects almost worse than not sleeping at all?

I am one of the unfortunates with a life-long sleeping problem, probably the victim of a set of genes that won’t allow me to drop off. I joke that my distant ancestors were professional, hereditary sentinels, employed for countless years to protect family and friends from wolves and sabre-tooth tigers in the dead of night. So if you are looking for a highly paid sentry………. However, it has to be stressed that it is not clear that the above negative effects apply to people who suffer from hereditary sleeplessness.

Epicureanism stands for enjoyment of life. Unfortunately, no philosophy of life, however positive, can offer a cure for seven consecutive nights of (maybe) one or at best two hour’s sleep – a tiresome burden for one’s wife as well as everyone around you. In those (frequent)circumstances irrationality rules and decisions are suspect.