It’s an appealing idea to skip work on a Monday. And at least one psychology professor says it’s a particularly good idea this Monday.

“A conservative recommendation is, stay at home,� said Simon Fraser University’s Dr. Ralph Mistlberger.

That’s because since daylight time sprang ahead early in the a.m. on Sunday, you’re more likely to have a fatal car accident or fall off a ladder or suffer any number of other fates until your body clock adjusts ­— by around Wednesday.

“The circadian clock that regulates our sleep-wake (schedule) has surprising difficulty adjusting to the change,� Mistlberger said.

One adjustment, for example, is that if you awoke for work last Friday at 7 a.m. it was light out. This morning, it was still pretty dark at 7 a.m.

That’s just toying with your brain, man.

But spring-ahead/fallback aside, why are so many of us are so tired so much of the time?

“There’s lots and lots of data suggesting that as a society we are chronically sleep-deprived,� said Stanley Coren, professor emeritus in psychology at UBC, who in 1996 wrote a book called Sleep Thieves. “Human beings should get nine to 10 hours of sleep every 24 hours.�

An eight-hour sleep and hour-long nap midafternoon would be fine, Coren said. A century ago, Canadians slept an average of nine hours a night.

“But somehow it’s got into people’s minds that sleeping long means you’re lazy,� Coren said.

Lack of sleep, besides being dangerous — falling asleep behind the wheel, for example, even if it’s only for 10 seconds in what’s known as micro-sleep — can also cause short-term memory reduction of about 15 per cent, wandering attention, greater susceptibility to illness and a host of other ill effects.

If not enough sleep is the problem, why don’t we just sleep more?

“There are a lot of reasons,� said Lulie Miller, the Squamish-based founder of Mountain Dreams Family Sleep Consulting. “In our society we’re all supposed to be busy, so we go, go, go. We never get to turn off, we’re always connected.�

Stress and anxiety are big factors that keep us awake, or prevent us from falling back to sleep if we do wake up in the middle of the night.

“We commute in traffic, we ride transit, we stay up later, we go to the theatre, to restaurants,� said Dr. Richard Godbout, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal. “People just don’t sleep enough.�

Stress, he said, occurs when you are not in control. It’s not necessarily that you try to do too many things — it can be waiting at the dentist’s office, for example.

“And stress drives you to be tired, it gets your system high-wired and it’s hard to disconnect and go to sleep.�

Then there’s that screen.

The flickering of a TV screen or the blue light from a computer, tablet or phone block your brain from producing the hormone that is naturally manufactured when it gets dark.

“The colour of our screens tricks our bodies into not making melatonin,� Squamish’s Miller said. “I’ve heard from moms who get up in the middle of the night to feed their babies and they go online, then wonder why they can’t get back to sleep. They’ve fooled their brains into thinking it’s morning.�