Ever since Roger Ebert tweeted something to the effect of “drowsy = seconds from death,” I’ve been obsessed with sleep.

Who can resist a description like that? I don’t know about you, but I’m often drowsy, and I’ve been told many times that my life will at some point be rudely interrupted by death.

Thus tempted by Twitter, I clicked Mr. Ebert’s link and read a fascinating report about sleep deprivation aimed at college students. 

My favorite paragraph:  

“If you believe that boredom, a warm room, or a heavy meal causes sleep, you are completely wrong! If boredom, a warm room, or anything else seems to cause you to feel drowsy, you have a sleep debt and you need to be stimulated in order to stay awake. If you frequently feel sleepy or drowsy in any dull or sedentary situation, you almost certainly have a very large sleep debt. A large sleep debt makes us vulnerable to apathy, inattention, and unintended sleep episodes. Errors, accidents, injuries, deaths, and catastrophes can be the result, not to mention poor grades.”

So I don’t care so much anymore about my grades, but injuries, deaths and catastrophes? Those I could do without, even if I am bummed I can no longer claim to be going into a food coma.

Then came the news this week about a study of high school students in Rhode Island. Researchers concluded that teenagers are wired to sleep between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. But their school schedules have them slouching out of bed between 5:45 a.m. and 6:30 a.m.—just when they’re in their deepest levels of sleep. 

So the researchers tried something interesting—moving the start of school back 30 minutes. This helped the kids focus better on classes and improved their moods so much that they moved their starting time back from 8 a.m. to 8:30 permanently.

Without intending to, I’ve been conducting my own mini sleep experiment this summer. 

During the school year, we have a pretty strict in-bed-by-8 policy. Among other things, this means we often leave Sunday dinners at my parents’ house as soon as the last forkful of pie has been inserted into the kids’ mouths. The kids hate it, but I am immune to their grumbling. It’s funny what almost 10 years of parenting will do for you in that regard.

Lucy is usually asleep as soon as her head comes in contact with the pillow. Alice, meanwhile, has been known to lie awake next to her for an hour or two. 

Then, when morning comes, Lucy usually stumbles into my office before 6 a.m. This drives me nuts—in theory, the early morning hours are when I do a big chunk of my work. Alice, on the other hand, usually needs to be lifted from the bed with a spatula, carried down stairs, and fed breakfast one spoonful at a time. It’s like reviving a corpse. This also drives me nuts, because it means we have to rush to get ready for school.

In an attempt to live a nuts-free summer, though, we’ve abandoned the bedtime rule. We do shut the kids in their room around 8:30 or 9, just so Adam and I can have some time together without having to answer the “what’s the grossest thing you ever saw” or similar question from Lucy, who is going through her Larry King phase. 

But the kids get to wake up whenever they want. Except for a few weeks of camp, we have no morning activities this summer. So far, it’s been great. We’re all less tired. I’m either less crabby or more patient, depending on how charitably you’re feeling.

It is, at this very moment, 8:43 a.m. My kids have just woken up, together, and are discussing their breakfast options as I type. They are also flipping through their math books, wondering how many pages they should do today. 

It feels a little bit like bizarro-world, where my night owl and early bird wake up together and work on (wait for it) math. 

But I think this says something about how tired most of us always are. This tiredness makes us shrink back to our most primal selves—our night owl, our early bird—and it makes us resist things as good for us as learning something new.

Without really trying, I learned something new about my family, and how we can have better days. It starts with how much sleep we get at night.