Eventually, Early Wraps Around To Late

Has anyone actually graphed Health, Wealth, and Wisdom vs Sleep Schedule?  


For the most part, with the possible exception of wisdom, it seems like all of them are pretty quantifiable metrics that should be able to be plotted.  Somebody just needs to get on that.  


I agree.  We've all heard the old-timey phrase, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."  Many of us have also heard the Equally Profound Corollary "Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, but socially dead." 

I'll wait here for a second while you watch the rest of the Wheel of Morality video...

So, I thought about this and got to thinking that the phrase was made during a time when the hours of the day were a slightly more rigid concept than they are today. 


There are still 24 hours in a day, dummy.  


Yes, but the activities during those hours are much more fluid than they used to be.  The world has gotten much smaller in the internets age, and people collaborate and communicate all over the world on a much more routine basis than when this phrase was coined.  Incidentally, the phrase is attributed to Benjamin Franklin and his book "Early Rising: A Natural, Social, and Religious Duty."  With people across multiple time zones living and working together much more regularly than they did back in Franklin's time, this makes the concept of "early" very different for every individual. 

Not only are people using different definitions of "early" when it comes to sleep patterns, but people's natural sleep cycles vary significantly, and the traditional concept of 8 hours of sleep per night is just as ambiguous.  On top of that, people of different ages require different amounts of sleep depending on their developmental needs, so early and early may not be best for them, medically. 

So, if we normalize the amount of sleep each person gets, is there a true correlation between start and stop times of sleep with respect to traditionally-defined standards of "early" and the resultant health, wealth, and wisdom of the test subject?  I'm not aware of any such studies being done.  Get on that, science!