Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, people used to have shorter lives. Perhaps due to not enough sleep.
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
Same here. I was utterly miserable for 3 months being woken by a puppy in the night. I never resented my girlfriend so much as when she convinced me a puppy was a good idea. Now the dog is older and fixed and sleeps throughout the night, which makes it high energy by the time we get home, which is its own sorry source of stress before bedtime. I am seriously reconsidering my interest to have kids later in life.
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)
I've got a new puppy waking me up...
The difference is that you're being woken up forcefully, and not waking up naturally. If you wake up during the wrong part of sleep, you often feel worse off than you were when you went to bed.
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 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.
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.
Support The GNU Project!! http://www.gnu.org
Or as they are commonly known in the post-industrial world: meetings.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
Having two children is the hardest thing in the world by leaps and bounds.
I'm sure people with 3 kids would disagree :-P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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
Especially active at the equator?
At the equator there are 3 simple rules in life:
1. Dress light but keep your legs covered
2. Be as inactive as possible
3. Avoid the sun.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
At the equator there are 3 simple rules in life:
1. Dress light but keep your legs covered
2. Be as inactive as possible
3. Avoid the sun.
Who would have thought the same rules for living at the equator would apply to working in IT.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
I wonder if the outdoors experience in our ancestral past is the source of the two-sleep periods TFA mentions.
After all, somebody had to get up and feed the fire, and maybe re-heat another chunk of the prior-day's catch for a snack, take a pee in the bushes, throw rocks at the Hyaenas, and before you know it the whole camp is awake. Military traditions from the first organized armies carried this forward with the changing of the guard, more peeing in more bushes, fire tending, debauching the POWs, and checking the horses. Flock tending, crop guarding, bush watering, and debauchery over the ages tend to train our brain to this two-sleep pattern.
The history and quality of beds over the ages suggests some of this waking up and walking around was just to shake off a few bugs that were feasting, or re-arrange the straw for more comfort.
Now as for backpacking, sleeping on the hard ground after a day schlepping a pack up hill and over dale might just cause a lot of sore muscles and compressed flesh due to that rock underneath the foam pad. Not big enough to get up and move it, but just big enough to keep you awake. And that bladder which, while filling, has not yet reached emergency stage yet also keeps the bushes coming to mind.
You could get up, water the bushes, move the rock, and take a ibuprofen, but then you would sleep so soundly that you would be eaten by wolves before you awoke again.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
These comments all make me feel much better. I sleep for around 3 hours after work (5pm-8pm) and then 3-4 hours before work (3:30am-7:30am). Obviously I don't have kids. I find that when I skip my post-work sleep I have to be doing something active to avoid being completely exhausted and useless. After my long nap/short sleep I am much more rested and can read and write more complicated things much more easily.
Everyone I know thinks these hours are weird, but it works so well for me that I intend to keep doing it as long as I can. These comments all serve to make me feel like a little bit less of an outsider. Thanks! :-)
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.