In my (admittedly self-regarding) opinion, I do my very best living between the hours of 11pm and, say, 3am. That’s when my children have been confined to their beds and I have the relative freedom that allows me to consume television until my eyes start to sting. Essentially, I’m talking about repeated episodes of Bullseye (the original Jim Bowen incarnation, not the abhorrent Dave Spikey reboot), maybe some BBC4 music documentaries that I’ve already seen seven or eight times, or one of the 45 episodes of A Place in the Sun that are clogging up my Sky box.

Essentially nothing that represents challenging viewing, because I’m too done in to think properly by then – anything on Netflix feels like a chore, plus there’s the added time needed to scroll through endless menus, deciding on what to watch.

The best way I can describe my nocturnal nirvana is that it’s like being alive while being partially dead – a battle against sleep in order to feel as though I’ve enjoyed some quality solitary time, even if nothing constructive is being achieved. A tiny, useless victory against the relentless tyranny of parenting.

Sadly, I don’t get to do it all that often, partly because I’m not a leisure-rich member of the aristocracy, but mainly because my children are still young and need help with feeding and dressing themselves before getting to school on time.

But at weekends or when there’s a school holiday – that’s when our rigid timetables get binned and I get to wallow on the sofa in dim light, binge on cerebral junk food and carefully work my way through some medium-quality alcohol.

Tragically though, the enduring nuisance that is science has come along to jam a spanner in my well-oiled works. A study from the chronobiologists at the University of Surrey (I had never heard of chronobiology – maybe I should have been watching something slightly more educational than Shooting Stars reruns) suggests that night owls are more prone to smoking, heavy drinking, depression and drug abuse. Oh, and unhealthy eating.

The study, published in Chronobiology International shows that late risers are 30% more likely to have diabetes, 22% more likely to have respiratory problems and 94% more likely to have psychological disorders.

Thankfully, the chronobiologists aren’t here to night-shame us – they argue that lives could be saved if society was more flexible to the needs of those who stay up late. They’ve found that the No 1 underlying factor when it comes to risk of premature death is chronic sleep deprivation.

It seems that some of us are predisposed towards a nocturnal existence – the body clock is partly determined by genes, but the study also found that those of us who burn the midnight oil are disproportionately likely to be white – possibly for cultural reasons or because Europeans may have evolved to go to bed and get up later.

Another study in American hospitals in 2012 showed 10% more patients were admitted with heart attacks on the days after the clocks went forward and 10% fewer when they went back.

Essentially, the chronobiologists’ argument is that if those of us who thrive in the small hours were allowed to start work at noon or later instead of pitching up bleary-eyed and barely coherent at 9am, the world would be a better place and we’d be attending fewer funerals of our night owl colleagues.

We’re all wired differently and while I’m not about to start shrieking that the nine-to-five routine is discriminatory against people who feel more comfortable in the small hours, there’s a genuine argument for making more of an effort to accommodate them.

While we’re lucky to be living in an era of more adaptable working practices, with home working and flexible hours increasingly available, surely more needs to be done if we all want to operate at our very best. And by “very best” I mean “slightly hungover and a bit stiff from passing out on the sofa at 4am”.

This has all come as a massive wake-up call for me. If I carry on with my night-time solitude, I may lose a few years. So in future, if you catch me tweeting about a 1980s episode of Top of the Pops at 2am, please tell me to get to bed – you could be saving my life.

• Andy Dawson is a freelance writer and author of Get in the Sea