Sleep your way to a high IQ

How did you sleep last night? If you managed only a few hours, it is possible you awoke this morning feeling, well, a little thick. For according to the latest research, not getting enough sleep can lower your IQ.

While this is an alarming suggestion, especially for anyone who has been through that form of sleep deprivation known as parenthood, this glowering cloud-like news might just have one of those shiny linings. After all, if you are having trouble with a knotty intellectual problem, such as remembering your own phone number or shoe size, you can indulge in a Grand Canyon yawn and say, "Sorry, can't do - didn't sleep very well last night."

Then you can explain that you must have left a pile of brain-cells on your barely-dented pillow, and will therefore have to decline furnishing a definitive answer, at least for now. As the IQ-lowering effect is thought to be temporary, you might be able to come up with "size nine" by mid-morning.

The Canadian researchers who discovered that sleepy heads might have a good excuse for being slow off the mark are said to be worried that Britons are becoming "borderline retarded" through missing too much sleep as the country turns into a 24-hour society.

Which is a funny thing, because I've come across one or two people who fleetingly struck me as borderline retarded, and it never occurred to me to inquire if they were getting enough sleep. Possibly because I was too busy yawning.

The latest lack of sleep theory runs something like this: you should try to get eight hours sleep a night, and making do with seven can temporarily knock a point off your IQ, with two more points docked if a further hour is lost. By this calculation, it is apparently easy to lose 15 points in a week. So a restless sleeper with an average IQ of 100 could be 'borderline retarded' by Friday - and what happens if such a sleepless dunderhead rounds off the week with a night cap of six pints isn't even worth contemplating.

Eight hours of sleep is a fine thing, but does anyone ever actually manage it? Mostly, I stumble by on six or seven. More would be nice, but that means going to bed early. Besides, weekends are for catching up, except when: you have to work; the five-year-old has decided that six am on a Sunday is party time; or the drunks housed just beyond the bottom of the garden haven't stopped swearing all night (oh, the joys of living near York's all-night debating society).

Sleep is a little like sex, as we'd all like more - though the one does tend to rule out the other. As to this 24-hour society lark, it seems a hyperactive absurdity to me. And the sooner we fall asleep to the fact, the better.

Gummy-eyed footnote written after a one-hour night: Mrs Thatcher famously got by on four hours sleep when she was Prime Minister, and yet remained a paragon of clear-eyed sanity.

After chucking out the chintz, the Swedish furniture chain Ikea has now chucked out hairy chins. Men who have "chosen to wear facial hair" are to be barred from the new store in Bristol. Beard permits will be issued temporarily, but only until it is firmly understood that "beardies equal weirdies".

This column had a beard once. Picked it up on a long holiday to Australia, but put it down again on arriving home. It was of the garden gnome design, all thick and furry under the chin but barely visible above.

Growing a beard is one of few fairly harmless male temptations, as you can radically change your appearance just by stopping shaving. Some of us venture no further than weekend stubble. Though there is one good reason for growing a beard: it now provides the perfect excuse for getting out of a hellish trip to Ikea.

25/03/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.