Apparently, we don’t need 8 consecutive hours of sleep a night and lying awake at night might even be good for you acccording to this article in BBC News Magazine:
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep….
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria…
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.
I suppose this is good news for those who think waking up at night is a problem.
Categories: Health and Fitness, History
What this article also means is that a person would need to go to bed about 10 hours (4 hours sleep, 2 hours awake, 4 hours asleep) before they planned to wake up. That is not an easy task to accomplish.
That’s funny. In recent years, I’ve developed problems with insomnia, so I began taking 3 mg of melatonin about an hour before bedtime. Now, I fall into a deep sleep for about four hours, wake up for 1-2 hours, during which time I read in bed or practice progressive relaxation techniques, then I fall back asleep, again, very deeply, for 3-4 more hours. I thought the waking in the middle was part of the old insomnia and I might need to up my melatonin dose. After reading this, I’ll hold off and see how I begin feeling, once I stop walking around the house like a zombie from the cumulative effects of chronic insomnia.
In the western world, the 4-1-4 arrangement may have also been diminished due to the decline in childbirths per family. A large family probably has a extended period of their life where they had to tend to infants and sometime sick toddlers on a continual basis.
I have an alarm clock which punishes me into adopting sensible sleep patterns. I don’t need the frickin’ BBC to tell me how breathe either or explain the mechanisms by which I swallow food.
This is extremely interesting. My “normal” sleep pattern is exactly like this. I’m literally unable to sleep more than 4-5 hours at a stretch.
Usually I’ll stay up till 2:00 am or so, then sleep until my alarm sounds at 7:00. Sometimes I get tired and go to bed early, say 11:00 or 12:00. Then I wake up at 3:00 or 4:00, surf the web for awhile, then try to catch a little more sleep at 5:00 or 6:00. When this happens, I sometimes sleep right through the alarm and am late for work.
So I guess my choices are to either settle for one sleep period (which I usually do), or else go to bed extra early, as WJW said. That’s no fun. I’m just not tired at 9:00 or 10:00.
I’m just not tired at 9:00 or 10:00.
Ah! But my ancestors who hunted and gathered, and who worked on farms or in factories certainly would have been.
The siesta countries may be on to something.