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Interrupted Sleep Might Be the Best Kind
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that a growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that eight-hours of uninterrupted sleep may be unnatural as a wealth of historical evidence reveals that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks called first and second sleep. A book by historian Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, 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. 'It's not just the number of references — it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,' says Ekirch. References to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century with improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses — which were sometimes open all night. Today most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep which could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. 'Our pattern of consolidated sleep has been a relatively recent development, another product of the industrial age, while segmented sleep was long the natural form of our slumber, having a provenance as old as humankind,' says Ekrich, adding that we may 'choose to emulate our ancestors, for whom the dead of night, rather than being a source of dread, often afforded a welcome refuge from the regimen of daily life.'"
I still sleep in two chunks, only I call the second one "work"
...I have two sleep phases. One at night at home, and one during the day at my desk at work.
I sometimes have insomnia in the middle of the night, after awaking from a few hours' rest. At first I was angry that I needed to get up soon and couldn't sleep, but then I started taking it in stride. If I cannot feel sleepy within 15 minutes or so of laying back down, I get up and read or work on a project or something for an hour or two until the sleepiness comes back, or simply nap after work the next day. Since doing that I feel more relaxed and natural. I am not sure if its biological or simply a state of mind, but I often find it is better not to force sleep if I am not ready for it, it just frustrates me and wastes time. Unfortunately, the way society is set up does not make it easy to run counter to that schedule of course, but I try.
As one who had his sleep interrupted during 40 years of medical practice, and now can sleep through the night, a full night of uninterrupted sleep feels wonderful- far better than interrupted sleep.
for you to wake me the heck up for this....
goes back to bed....
Call it a self discovery, but I found napping after I get home from work for two hours is life changing. It clear sthe mind from stress and when you wake up, you feel like the work day happened just 12 hours ago. Feeling mentally and physically detached from the office has been extremely beneficial to me. But then again, I suppose it's because I do work about 50 to 55 hours a week.
Life is not for the lazy.
I find this very interesting... for as long as I can remember I wake up in the middle of the night, usually around 2-3 am and lay awake for a while before going back to sleep (with differing amounts of success). Maybe now there's an actual reason or explanation why?
nothing to see here. This article is nothing new. YES our bodies have evolved with natural processes tuned to respond to our natural surroundings. This was "common" knowledge to homo sapiens but sometime around the industrial revolution, we evolved into humanoid machine meta sapiens. Now, we spend more time indoors under artificial lighting and in manufactured vehicles than we do in natural surroundings. We read books and news articles to learn what to do with our bodies and learn how they work. We also forgot how to relate to other bodies and now need a presence online to communicate because we can not physically express ourselves. SO...move along this is just another science article. Now go back to "sleep".
Always wanted to try the Uberman http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/720
Unfortunately, other people that I have to work with did not approve.
And too much soup, beer, whatever, before go sleep.
Over-efficient kidneys, too.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My Sleep Dr always says to try and get 7 hours but I can only get between 4-6. Some of it is just LIFE. Good example is when I first laid down, I still wasn't really tired. I just wrapped my blanket a bit tighter and listened to a podcast and conked out about 20 minutes later. The bad part is this was at 2 am. I woke up and after I snagged a cup of coffee I feel pretty good.
Sleep Apnea and other sleep disorders is one thing I wish I didn't have. I am convinced we don't know near enough about sleep.
As a parent of two small children, I've been forced to do "segmented sleep" for extended periods (our babies were not good eaters so we had to wake them up in the middle of the night for a feeding). It sucks, and I'm positive that I'm not the only parent to have experienced this.
Just going to sleep in the evening and waking up in the morning feels a lot better and more natural to me.
-- 77IM
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
There's countless millions of pre-industrial people alive today. Do they commonly exhibit this behavior? You don't need to dig through medieval diaries when there are humans alive now who exist at varied levels of social and technological development. I'm more interested how agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies treat sleep today than urban Europeans a few hundred years ago. Urban Europeans have always engaged in bizarre activities.
Unfortunately, whether sleeping in two bits is beneficial is a moot point, since in today's society it is not a practical proposal. Most people simply don't have the time to make the night last longer than the eight hours that we have. Telling people to take a break in the middle will just cause them to sleep less, and we aren't doing too well on that subject as is.
I think it's a symptom of overpopulation. Because there are a lot of us, we need to work harder to eke out a living on this planet, and we have to make sacrifices for that. Some people can afford to work part-time, and I envy them, but most of us simply can't.
I call bullshit. I've got a new puppy waking me up every night around 2 AM, then again around 6-7 AM, for almost 2 months, and I've never been so tired before. Ever.
Plenty of the Latin countries still adhere to a segmented sleep pattern.
In my personal case, the period between 1 and 4 pm is useless for getting anything creative accomplished and my emotional state and creativity peaks in the hours beginning at dusk and for many hours after.
The pattern of siesta and staying up late for dinner, etc. seems to fit this pattern quite nicely.
And my wife keeps asking why I insist on waking every 10 minutes to search the house...and also sleep propped up in a chair with a loaded gun beside me.
See, honey, THIS IS WHY!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Does this mean I get first and second breakfast too? Those hobbits were on to something!!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I wonder, does anybody know how other primates handle sleep? If it's ingrained as they say, one would think our ancestors would also display the same tendencies.
One of the underlying issues that most overlook is sleep apnea. There are a few types of sleep apnea but most experience it from being overweight or smoking. Those affected by sleep apnea will wake up often and have interrupted sleep. Most will never get a deep sleep and don't seem to even have dreams.
Also, people used to have shorter lives. Perhaps due to not enough sleep.
With all the glowing screens and communication devices we have, it's easy to fill every hour at night as full as you would during the day.
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Just look at a normal sleep EEG and tell me that you're reaching consciousness naturally during these periods. You naturally sleep the whole night. I don't see where they're getting "you will wake up at least once and that's fine" from the fact that they're reading 500-year-old accounts of people who basically had trouble sleeping.
I think Ekirch's research is obviously correct but his conclusions might be a little off. it's well known already people tend to lose productivity during the afternoon in the modern day workplace. This is why the Europeans have their siesta . Prior to the industrial era and the advent of lighting yes, we may have had our circadian clocks synced to this pattern prof. Ekirch talks about. However, it is Post-Industrial now, many countries around the world have constant non natural light and many individuals work around the clock and have varying shifts. As a result, the need for sleep - or "power naps" - hasn't changed, our clocks have just synced to a different schedule. Where you are in the world and the personal schedule you have will determine the optional time for that cat nap needed to recharge.
Again, it's not that we don't need to "sleep" twice in a day, more than likely we do. there is evidence that points to its benefits, however as we are finding out with medicine today, it would be and should be tailored to the individual and their schedule.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
I've heard claims that da Vinci believed polyphasic sleep was more restorative and that he frowned on sleeping for extended periods of time at once. Of course, I probably read this on the internet so we know it is fact and proves that all great minds slept with the regularity of a cat's sleep schedule. I don't know why they spent time researching it when they could have just read the internet.
Except that I need to be alert and awake for my job so I have to cram as much sleep in as possible to make it through the day, and if I want any time after work to do anything I can't afford to nap.
I know government/work would love if all I did was go to work, come home, nap a bit, get up, do a bit of laundry, make dinner, go to bed, go back to work and repeat.
Unfortunately for them, I'm not a slave. So until they adjust what they want me to do to fit with napping / segmented sleep, it's too bad.
Interrupted Sleep Might Be the Best Kind.
The next best kind would perhaps be the coitus one?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The longer i tend to sleep past 6 hours, the worse I feel throughout the day.
Some of my best/most productive days have been on 3-4 hours of sleep.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I can't agree with this. Sometimes I take a nap after work, then am up way too late, and then get about half a night's sleep. I definitely feel worse than I would if I slept uninterrupted for 9 hours, even if that might be the total of the two halves.
I think the key thing to remember here is that this was most popular at a time when most people would go to bed around dusk due to the lack of available light. If you go to bed that early, it could well work to have segmented sleep. There's a lot of variables floating around when it comes to how to get 'a good night's sleep'. Calling bullshit just because being woken up during the night by your new puppy or baby makes you feel like crap seems a bit far fetched to me. There's so many other variables that are modified due to our modern lifestyle.
He was noted for having maintained, by preference, the split-shift sleeping schedule which he'd become accustomed to while serving in the Navy even after the war --- this was noted in the biographical notes section of at least one printing of his unfinished book _The Master Mariner_.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I don't know about others, but I can't get enough rest if my sleep is segmented. I find that I rest more if my sleep is wholly uninterrupted at night. I wake up more grumpy and tired than I started with if I had to wake up at any time for no valid reason - whether it's my cat scratching the wall to get me to open the curtains so he jump on the window, or getting up because my bladder has to be emptied right then. I used to have insomnia as a little kid and I think the fact that I can't fall asleep easily is rooted in that, so I value full sleep rather than having it in segments BECAUSE it is so hard for me to just get back into sleep mode. I guess it depends on each person, but how are you supposed to get a full night's worth of sleep if you keep waking up at random intervals?
Those that complain that they have experienced interrupted sleep (e.g. with kids, medical profession, etc.) and prefer uninterrupted sleep are missing the point.
The article talks about "segmented sleep", let's say you sleep 4 hours at night and 4 hours in the day.
In other words, you go to sleep and naturally wake up whenever your body feels like (nothing interrupted the sleep), then get active, the go to sleep again and naturally wake up again (nothing interrupted the sleep), then get active again. Rinse and repeat every day.
A car analogy (electric car):
Charge up the batteries
do errands
Charge up the batteries
do more errands
This would guarantee that all errands are done at almost full power and speed.
If instead you:
Charge the batteries
Do lots of errands
The problem is that probably the last errands will be done with less power and speed as the batteries are almost drained.
"interrupted sleep" would be like losing power so can't fully charge the batteries in the above examples.
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Or as they are commonly known in the post-industrial world: meetings.
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Finally, a plausible scientific theory as to why my sleep seems more restful when I hit the snooze button a few times, rather than jumping out of bed immediately at the first alarm. Not that any such theory would convince my snooze-button-averse wife...
Maybe if I just go to sleep when i'm tired, like soon after work, perhaps i'll sleep better. But i'm afraid i won't wake up and sleep a full 8 or more hours. Making the next day a really long day. But then it seems i'm the least tired between 11pm and 2am and i so i don't end up getting enough sleep. Making the next day a really REALLY long day.
Who gets eight hours of sleep?
I had an "on-call" week from hell before Christmas last year. Didn't get more than 3 hours of contiguous sleep that week. I caught strep throat and was sick my entire Christmas vacation (both days). No, I didn't RTFA, but I think their study must have not taken into account sleep interrupted by external stimuli. I need at least 8 hours in my bed. Asleep or otherwise :D
--fatboy
Anyone out there wan to help me make a DIY Android lucid dreaming mask like the Nova Dreamer?
When I backpack I rarely sleep uninterrupted. Around 2-3am I'll wake partially and then sleep lightly from then on. I feel fine the next day.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Or even any sleep cycle of their choice. Only the rich have this choice.
The rest of us have to put up with overpriced apartments with paper thin walls, other people's kids, sex, basketball and every working schedule known to man.
After 20 years of being woken by slamming doors, stomping feet, fights, stereos, TVs, cars, very vocal sex at any random hour of the night, you start to forget what normal sleep is like. I suspect such sleep deprivation causes brain damage occurs after time, but that just makes it easier.
Regardless, choice of sleep hours is a luxury that is only available to the very rich. It is completely irrelevant to the rest of us.
Amazing how, in the space of three days, two studies were released with essentially opposite conclusions:
http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2012/02/sleep_research_alzheimers.php
Not speaking to the veracity of either "body of evidence" just making an observation.
They probably blame uninterrupted sleep on global warming because obviously people pre-global warming slept in two stages, now people sleep in one state, so obviously global warming is to blame. I can also see England attaching loud speakers to Big Ben and blasting a wake up chime at 3:00 am as an effort to stop global warming and have people sleep in two stages again.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
As a father of two small kids I've had interrupted sleep for years, it's not good and you don't feel better the next mornig. A full 6-8 hours sleep is perfecto to me.
I suppose it's worth pointing out that with the high infant mortality before about 200 years ago, there were a lot more new-born babies around.
Most sleep studies, including the concept of "circadian rhythm" strike me as junk science. They fail to distinguish between a 24-hour cycle caused by the length of a day and a mere tendency towards ~24 hours because that's how our systems evolved in the millions of years that we had to make do without artificial light. What it does not account for is the length of day at different latitudes. Are people especially sleepy at the poles? Especially active at the equator? Doubt it.
I think it's a lot more intellectually honest to say that the body has a pretty good idea of when it needs to rest. Sometimes you need more/less rest because of your activity level during the day. If someone is digging a ditch all day, they need to rest sooner/more often than someone who is working at a desk. And if you establish a long-term pattern of this behavior, such that your work/rest cycle is not ~24 hours, the circadian rhythm doesn't account for that. It will have you sleeping more/less or at other times than is optimum for your body.
All this reminds me of "food science". There are some people in this field who want to define every possible molecule as being "healthy" or "unhealthy" for you, on a fixed scale, when the simple truth is that any one thing in excess is bad, and that a balance of things is needed for proper health. The balance that is right for you depends on your body and what you do with it.
Unless you have an identifiable disorder that is demonstrably harmful to you, just follow your body's advice. Sleep when you're tired, eat natural/whole foods that you get a craving for. (Processed foods are tricky because their ingredients are selectively chosen by other people. Although, relatively few people have a working "food instinct" than have a working resting instinct. As far as I can tell the vast majority of people do have the latter.)
I get tired rather fast after work, so I've have done a lot of split sleep shifts. The only trick is when you have to still keep an 8-5 office schedule the next day, the WHOLE split sleep takes some 13 hours for me, including the block in the middle, so that I can't "dawdle after work" and start the pattern much later than about 6PM to really do it right.
This is a topic I've had an amateur interest in for years, so I may get The Book mentioned in The Article.
The key "potential drawback" is that they used to say that two short blocks don't lead up to the last long REM cycle that's supposed to be the one that really does wonders for your health at hours 6-8 in the 8 hour cycle. So I'd want to read The Book to see what became of that piece of Former-Wisdom.
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I've noticed my cats also practice interrupted sleep.
They sleep for 11 hours- wake for an hour to eat/use litter box/scratch up the furniture. Then they sleep for 12 more hours.
The cats seem very rested and happy- I think I need to follow the cat model for success.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I have the same problem. My wife likes to take afternoon naps. I've tried- If I fall asleep for more than 10 minutes at any time after noon- I will not be able to sleep that night. If I wake up at night (and don't immediately fall back asleep) I won't fall asleep again.
It was horrible when we had babies in the house- pretty much the first time they woke up at night was the last of the sleep I'd get for that night. After several weeks with each of our three kids I learnt to just stop even bothering trying to sleep after I was awakened.
Many an enemy civilization was destroyed in Civ III and IV for the first 3 or 4 months of my babies lives because I couldn't sleep and played civ instead.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
For a while when I was in school, I would go to sleep right after dinner, get up a bit before midnight, Work until about 4 or 5 am, then sleep again until time to get up for class. It was incredibly productive and comfortable, but not exactly conducive to a social life
In hindsight- maybe I wouldn't have had trouble sleeping if Civ V had been developed back then.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I am not sure what gave rise to the standard pattern of "Shorts+socks+sandals" with the optional T-shirt and Beard, but this stereotype is certainly common in IT where I have worked. Of course, that is exactly what I tended to wear when I worked there... :P
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I find that what I eat for lunch has a large effect on how tired I become mid afternoon. If I eat foods like white bread or rice, with simple carbohydrates, I crash in the afternoon. If my lunch is more "complex", I do better.
I'm fortunate enough to be self employed, so I can often take my tired feeling and use it as an excuse to go for a run or a bike ride.
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Really, just because our ancient ancestors slept in two chucks does that mean that we should? They also slept in caves and made tools from rocks and bones and had a life span half of ours, should we be doing that too? I am kind of thinking that evolution needs to step in here.
I used to have sex in the middle of the night, but nowadays my wife kicks me if I try and wake her up for that...
This story pops up every year, and they always talk about how Ben Franklin would have 2 or 3 one hour stretches of "wakeful sleep" every night. I mean, just imagine that fucker in his old timey pajamas, holding a candle! Haha wow! Maybe we should all sleep like him.
Nope. Fuck you. Interrupted sleep is terrible. If it was good for you, parents of newborns would be so alive, cheerful, youthful, energetic, productive, etc.
The reality is, of course, that they are grumpy, zombies.
It was done by our 'ancestor' therefor it's the best way to do things.
Studies done with scientific rigor are the only way to determine if breaking up your sleep is optimal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is similar to what I did in university. I called it short-cycling back then and lived on a 12hour day (2-4 hours sleep). Usually sleeping some time between 6-10pm and 4am-8am which was just fine for a social life (although not so great for the 7:30am lecture class skipped every tuesday my sophomore year)...
I found the so-called biphasic sleep schedule to be very productive (and very helpful as I was taking lots of coursework and was editing the school newspaper at night). Being awake between lunch and dinner was good for school and between 10pm and 4am was great for studying and socialization.
My motivation for this was after researching Leonardo Davinci and Buckminster Fuller and how they allegedly slept only a few hours a night and took lots of catnaps to become more productive.
I fell back to the typical 6-8 hours at night after university (dinner got later after work and there wasn't much to do between 1am and 4am, but was amused to see that this whole thing was mentioned during an episode of Seinfield a few years after I graduated (didn't really work out for Kramer in the sitcom, though)
Unfortunatly, I have an infant to care for, it's sorta been forced back on me now and kinda works... With my current experience, my take away is that if humans weren't adapted to polyphasic sleep, the species would fail to survive.
That, right there, is the NoVA condition.
Isn't that a Nap?
Caveman ran around, being predator and prey all day. He ate and he found a spot to take a rest in the middle of the day. To me it sounds like a nap.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Just because humans had to operate under those conditions in the past does not mean that sleeping in that manner was better for health in the long run. Not getting chased by wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers is another thing we seem to be doing better without.
This is pretty weird, because this is exactly how I sleep. I have two alarm clocks, and I set one for three (originally two) hours prior to the time I actually have to be up. I use this first period of wakefulness to shower and shave. The original purpose of this sleep method was to dispense with the phenomenon of going to sleep, waking up 10 minutes later, and discovering those "10 minutes" were in fact seven hours, and that despite how sleepy you still feel, it's time to get up.
I've been doing this for a decade, and I have to say.. I'll never stop.
It's a fascinating idea, but I wonder how to reconcile it with what we know about melatonin (and other hormones like cortisol) which are implicated in sleep/wakefulness and which seem to go up and down on a 24-hour cycle...
I guess if both "first" and "second" sleep take place in the same 12-hour period, it's not a big contradiction. But what if the first and second bedtime are equally spaced (twelve hours apart)? (I've actually done this at times, due to a strange work schedule, and it seemed to work well. It also seemed logical. Why *not* recharge your batteries at equal intervals?)
Here in Greece we don't sleep for 8 hours at night, we sleep for 3 hours in the evening and for 5 hours during the night.
Glad to see this article! For about a year now, I've been a biphasic sleeper: bed at 22:00, up at 03:00, work until next bedtime at 07:00 an up again at 09:00. As students we were told the most effective study time is right before bed as during sleep, you integrate what you've learned. With two sleep periods it's just that much better (I've read that research substantiates that claim). And of course one can get a lot of uninterrupted work done from 3 to 7 am.
I sleep pretty well but my partner has been suffering from almost 18 months of wacked out sleep. I sent it along to her to help her realize that this is not an unusual set of circumstances.
I note most of the historic references from the link were from the middle ages-pre Renaissance mostly. I wonder if in roman times if people got along better, and were apparently more productive for it, due to sleeping once? I for one, don't wish to replicate much of the post roman pre-enlightenment days in any respects. I mean if it was so natural, couldn't they find a a reference for it beyond homer in antiquity or biblical texts?
This seems most unlikely, since until the appearance of electricity most of humanity lived by sun time, and slept during the dark hours. Only the affluent could afford "artificial" light, eg tallow based tapers, candles, olive oil and other similar based lamps etc. For the overwhelming majority it wasn't possible to do anything useful with a waking interval between dusk and dawn.
What are you all? Retirees? What's up with all these comments about napping and wanting to sleep? Caffeine-free, plenty of exercise, enough sleep here.