Sleep, it seems to me, is a bit like alcohol. Everyone is an expert on how much other people should get, while being a rather poorer judge when it comes to deciding what's good for themselves. Only this week we've had assertions that the "right kind of sleep" can improve your exam results and help women live longer than men, and that the right amounts of sleep can be assessed and doled out to schoolchildren as if they were portions of fruit and vegetables. So there are views not only on how much you sleep, but where, when and how you do it.

Just before I get on to these academic studies, I can give you an example much closer to home. I'm dozing peacefully in my favourite armchair, gently lulled by Newsnight or yet another repeat of New Tricks, when a voice cuts through the tranquillity like a knife: "Why don't you go to bed, Pete; you'll be so much more comfortable there?"

It's framed as a question, but it isn't one, nor is it intended as a basis for debate. It's an order, founded on the belief that there is a time and a place for sleeping, and that 11pm in your favourite chair isn't it.

The problem is, as any habitual armchair sleeper knows, that although I might indeed be more comfortable in bed, I will no longer be asleep. The mere act of rousing myself will have banished sleep for the next couple of hours. It's evidence that my first premise about alcohol is right, though, because I do exactly the same to my wife when it is she who is peacefully stretched out on the sofa, while I'm awake taking my turn at being the "sleep police".

I guess it all goes back to childhood – both yours, and then, as you seek revenge, that of your own children. First, before they can answer back, because they wake us in the middle of the night; then because they won't go to sleep when we want them to; then because they wake up before we want them to. We like to think this is all based on what's good for them, when in fact, it's based on what's good for us.

I'm sure the Sleep Council would disagree with me (I think my wife may be a member). It's produced figures reminding us that six- to 12-year-olds need on average 10 hours sleep, and teenagers an average of eight to nine hours. It bemoans the fact that not a lot of parents seem to know this. Its researchers saved particular astonishment for the fact that only 19% of parents who participated in its survey seemed to be aware that electronic gadgets in the bedroom might "distract from sleep".

Didn't know, or didn't care, I feel compelled to ask. Or perhaps some of us have reached a point where we're more in tune with the way children think, act and sleep? People such as Paul Kelley, head of Monkseaton school on Tyneside, who has catered for the apparent bodyclock shift forwards experienced by teenagers, so that instead of needing their 10 hours from 9pm, we've now discovered they need their eight to nine hours from midnight. I have to say it's a cunning biological clock indeed that allows for the fact that there are far more interesting things for teenagers to do between nine and midnight, than between seven and 10 in the morning.

Anyway, Kelley has achieved this by putting back first lessons at his school until 10am, achieving an average 19 per cent improvement in GCSEs between A- and C-grades. He's achieved similar or even more impressive rises in all the core subjects, so this is clearly a result that takes a lot of explaining away, although the naysayers have had a try.

It's a measure of the difficulty of their task that the bravest effort was "that teachers relish innovation, and therefore perform better when asked to carry them out". Pardon? All I can say is that I could have done with a few more Paul Kelleys in my youth. My experience has been that fixed ideas about acceptable periods of sleep work against those who don't need very much, of which I was one. My parents, liberal in most respects, could not be convinced that when I said I didn't want to go to sleep, I meant it; but it became far worse when I went off to boarding school, where the entire system was based on conformity. The first punishment I received was for waking up too early, and demonstrating the fact by moving around. I had to write out 100 times: "I must not wake up before the bell goes", convincing me for all time of the idiocy of adult authority.

The lesson I learned was not how to sleep for my statutory 10 hours, but how to lie perfectly still. It's also when I discovered all those wonderful mind-expanding activities that can get you through the hours of darkness, perfected and so beloved by hostages. In my case this included counting down a quarter of an hour, 900 seconds, between the regular tolling of the school clock; reciting the 92 English football league teams in alphabetical order, and when all else failed, tracking the syncopated snoring patterns of my room-mates, and predicting whose breathing rhythms would change first (surprisingly, I didn't grow up to be a bookmaker). With the discovery of Braille, a system you could read silently and undetected under the bedsheets, my victory over sleeplessness was complete, and I've always felt sorry for those people who fret about being awake: there is, after all, so much you can do.

I'm sure genuine insomniacs will tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but I do still find myself wondering just how much the horror of wakefulness experienced by so many people is caused by the bean counters who have always rushed to tell us for how long, where and when we ought to be asleep. And now I see that, not content with harrying us in our cradles, the bean counters are set on hurrying us to our graves. It emerges that light or non-sleepers like me are not only not getting the right amount of sleep, we aren't getting the right kind, either.

Harvard scientists, God bless them, have discovered that on average – here we go again – men are missing out on the more relaxing, slow-wave sleep, which keeps us healthy, and that we are almost doubling the risk of high-blood pressure, and all that goes with it. Suffice to say that it's just one more reason why women tend to live longer than men. They, it seems, get truckloads of this priceless slow-wave sleep. I'd like to discuss with the scholars of Harvard whether my relaxed attitude to sleeplessness would help in any way. With the five-hour time difference, it would be something else to do in the long watches of the night, but as I've already been diagnosed with slightly high blood pressure, I guess I'll save the phone bill and accept my fate.

Ian Jack is away.