A 1998 BMJ Paper Put Franklin's Early-Rising Proverb to the Test. The Larks Did Not Win.

Does going to bed early and rising early make a person healthy, wealthy and wise? In one direct test, no. Christopher Gale and Christopher Martyn, writing in the BMJ in December 1998, followed 1,229 British adults aged 65 and over for 23 years and found no sign that larks were better off than owls on health, income or cognitive scores.

A single paragraph carries the finding: a 1998 BMJ study of 1,229 British adults aged 65 and over, followed for 23 years, found no evidence that going to bed and getting up early was associated with better health, higher socioeconomic standing or better cognitive performance than going to bed and getting up late. The study tested the proverb one clause at a time, and none of the three held in that sample.

Where the proverb comes from

Benjamin Franklin gets the credit, and Franklin did print a version of it. The line is older than he is. John Clarke’s 1639 book of English proverbs already carries it, roughly a century before the almanac. By the time it reached Poor Richard’s Almanack it was folk advice that fit the working day of a farming population, where the cow had opinions about the hour.

James Thurber, who did not buy it, rewrote it in Fables for Our Time (1940): “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.” The joke has outlived most of the studies that tried to settle the question.

How the test was built

The paper is three pages long and its method is simple. The authors took an existing cohort of older people in Britain, sorted them by when they said they went to bed and got up, and compared the groups on socioeconomic position, cognitive performance and health.

Taken one clause at a time, the result was the same three times. Larks showed no health advantage. They were not richer, and the late sleepers did not trail them. On cognitive testing the early group did no better.

Why the proverb outlived its evidence

A paper that finds nothing rarely gets quoted, so the proverb keeps circulating without it. The proverb works as a character reference: a person who rises early is virtuous, and the lie-in is a small moral failing. Samuel Johnson wrote that exact resolution in his diary again and again between 1738 and 1777 (the entries are collected here), treating the hour as a debt of character rather than a health plan. Once the virtue is attached to the hour, anyone who wakes at 5:30 has an argument for their own character, and anyone who wakes at 8:00 has a defense to mount. The cultural side of that is its own story.

If early rising caused better outcomes, a 23-year cohort should have shown a gap. A gap did not appear. The early hour still has uses, but they are local ones: a person with a 6:00 shift needs to be up at 5:15, and a person who wants quiet for writing may find it before the house wakes. A scheduling reason does not carry a health claim along with it.

What a cohort of retirees can and cannot say

The sample was old, and people over 65 are mostly retired, so their sleep times plausibly reflect preference more than employment. That makes the result a cleaner test of the proverb’s biology than of its economics. It says little about a 35-year-old whose manager schedules a 9:00 meeting, where lateness has a price and the mismatch between body clock and workday is a separate research topic (social jetlag measures it). And because a cohort study compares people who chose different hours, it cannot say what happens when one person changes theirs.