Maybe You Don't Need 8 Hours of Sleep After All (theatlantic.com)

schwit1 writes: You've heard of the Paleo diet, but the next big thing in health may well be the Paleo sleep schedule. A UCLA researcher studied three hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer groups -- the Hadza in Tanzania, San in Namibia, and Tsimane in Bolivia, "who live roughly the same lifestyle humans did in the Paleolithic," as NPR reports -- and determined our ancient ancestors may not have slept nearly as much we thought, and may have actually slept less than modern Westerners. "People like to complain that modern life is ruining sleep, but they're just saying: Kids today!" Jerome Siegel tells the Atlantic . "It's a perennial complaint but you need data to know if it's true." Siegel found that members of the three aforementioned groups sleep between 5.7 hours and 7.1 hours per night. That's less than is recommended for our health, yet the groups seemed very healthy indeed. (And if you're feeling insomniac, some earlier Slashdot stories about sleep are also pretty thought-provoking.)

Comments

Re:Depends

[The Real Dr John]

This is not science, this is anecdotal. Neuroscience has shown recently that the brain moves waste products, excess transmitters and toxic products out during sleep via the paravascular glymphatic system. Just because people can get away without lots of sleep, especially when younger, does not mean that there are not long term health consequences from doing so over extended periods of time.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Segmented Sleep

[transporter_ii]

And odd sleeping patterns did carry over into the Western world, too. It's called segmented sleep and there are tons of old books that mention it. What we are doing now came about as a result of the industrial age, when we started to have to work 8 - 10 hour shifts.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...