Benjamin Franklin might have started the whole thing when he wrote: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Or maybe it was that old saw about the early bird catching the worm.

Whatever the culprit, we layabeds are forced to live among the boastful disciples of those creeds, the early risers who remind us whenever possible how much they accomplish each morning long before we’ve even begun to stir. You know the type, the crack-of-dawners who greet the rising sun before enthusiastically embarking on task-filled days that put slumberers to shame. By the time the rest of us are waking, they’ve already jogged for an hour, walked the dog, got a jump on the office paperwork, paid the bills, changed the oil in the car and perhaps even put on a pot of baked beans for supper.

In contrast, we slugabeds are made to feel less virtuous, less industrious, a drag on our go-go society. If old Ben was correct about the benefits of being in the up-and-at-’em crowd, the healthy, wealthy and wise set, then I guess the rest of us are doomed to be sickly, poor and dumb. We snooze, we lose, as the tired saying goes. As one researcher said in a New York Times story about recent sleep-habit studies, “It’s a uniformly negative characteristic” to be asleep while others are going about their business.

Yet the article goes on to provide an interesting glimpse into the minds of the rise-and-shiners of the world that might allow the rest of us to shed our sleep guilt without having to shed our blankets prematurely. Researchers have found that the time we wake up actually has little bearing on our success or income. Not only that, but many of the earliest risers, it turns out, are not being entirely truthful about their waking times.

Dr. Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California, San Diego, attached motion sensors to the wrists of subjects to determine when they got out of bed in the morning. Though 5 percent of the subjects claimed they were awake by 4 a.m., the sensors detected not even the twitch of a finger among any of them at that ungodly hour. They were dead to the world. And while 10 percent of subjects insisted they were up and raring to go by 5 a.m., half of them were found snuggled under the covers at that time.

Dr. Edward Stepanski, a sleep researcher at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, found that people who insist they function perfectly well on little sleep also may be exaggerating their claims. In one study, he said, subjects who said they needed only five hours of sleep were found to be sneaking in long naps and sleeping late on weekends to compensate for their deficit. Researchers believe that 10 percent of people are extremely early risers, 10 percent are extremely late risers, and the rest lie somewhere in the middle – but not always restfully, it seems.

The National Sleep Foundation, in observance of National Sleep Awareness Week, recently released a poll showing that 75 percent of adults have frequent sleep problems that cost them and their partners precious shut-eye. The snoring of partners was the most common complaint, causing bedmates to lose nearly 50 minutes of sleep a night on average and to seek relief in separate bedrooms or on couches. Such desperate measures, said a sleep foundation director, often has a “terrible effect on the relationship.”

Now there’s a wake-up call that’s hard to ignore.