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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.'"
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.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but... no kids?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I've been forced to do "segmented sleep"
If it's forced, then you're not actually doing it... The story is about waking naturally between sleeps, not waking yourself up on a schedule. It also seems based on going to bed shortly after dusk which, at least for me, is hours before I've trained myself to go to bed.
That was me before I got married/kids. It was fantastic..
I would get up and have another 4-6 hours of _VERY_ productive time. I would go running, go to the gym, write code, go to the local bar and hit on women, remodel the house, etc. This was when I was the most effective.
Now I just walk around like a zombie all day, until I hit the bed. Nothing really gets done unless I drink massive quantities of caffeine.
And that, Mr. A.C., is the difference between waking up and being woken up.
0x or or snor perron?!