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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.)
Ok, so paleolithic-people in a paleolithic environment need 5.7 to 7.1 hours of sleep/night. What about modern people in a modern environment? As humans, we’re not all that different, but our daily lives are very different. We get less exercise, we eat completely different foods, many jobs are primarily mental. And we hold more rigid daily schedules. I think that MAYBE could require more sleep.
I've read quite a bit about how hunter gatherers sleep. Because of predators and other dangers, at any given point during the night, someone is usually awake. The teens stay up late, the old people wake up early, and then there are women with children that are up at odd hours with the baby. This works out so that there is always someone watching the tribe or village.
The big difference between Westerners and hunter gatherers is that if they get tired during the day, they can take a nap. We can't do that. In fact, there are a lot of places, Mexico, for instance, that let people sleep an hour or so in the afternoon.
It doesn't matter how much sleep I get, about 2:00ish, I get sleepy, just like a lot of people in the rest of the world. The difference is, a fair amount of the rest of the world can actually go to sleep.
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I would also suspect that due to the increased use of our brains for more complex tasks puts more stress on that system. That could require more down time than a tribal hunter/gatherer.
Not only that, but there is a genetic diversity to take into account. That, and what is being expressed currently.
I get exceptionally perturbed when people state "You need $x" of ANYTHING. Whether the amount of fat or protein, the amount of sleep, the amount of O2 in the air, you name it... every single human being is a random collection of variables that requires a different care cycle.
Some people NEED more sleep, others NEED less sleep. Hell, it's not even that concise either. There are people who have brains that need more downtime, with bodies that need less down time, and vice versa! All manner of metabolic activity happens when sleeping.
Any time you hear a broad based statement like "You need $x of $y of the healthy!", just keep one thing in mind. We aren't cars, coming off of a production line. It's like someone went to a junkyard, found pieces from 100 different cars, and put you together.
If you can roll down the road, and keep moving on your own? You're alive and kicking and viable.
But, don't tell me I need a certain amount of oil or a specific type of brake fluid ... or, this or that replacement parts every few years.
You *can* tell me that getting hit by a truck is bad, or that my gas engine won't run without oxygen, and that my metal body doesn't like salt.
But just like a human, frankencar -- when exposed to salt, will rust in a random way, since his parts are from a random hodgepodge of parts.
Bah! $x hours of sleep indeed! Even siblings don't all need the same amount of sleep!
No, no I haven't, because that's silly hipster shit. I googled it, and a bunch of marketing crap came up. I wonder if that has anything to do with it being as stupid as it sounds.
I'd like to caution the reader to take TFA with a grain of salt, lest they decide to use it as an excuse to feel better about getting less than the recommended 7.5-8 hours of sleep. Specifically, I'd like to note the following:
1. The study in question concerns the sleep requirements of people who have a lifestyle incomparable to yours.
2. The sleep pattern in TFA for a primitive society is different not only from yours, but also from what appears to have been the natural tendency for pre-industrial civilization (at least I Europe) for quite a few centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
3. The study does not and is unable to take into account any of the very long-term effects of less sleep, in terms of possible influences on old-age brain diseases such as Alzheimers or other dementias. A primitive forager doesn't usually live to an age where such things are an issue. The physiological evidence, though, ought to make you pause and think about the fact that you need enough deep sleep in order to allow microchannels in your brain to expand and allow increased flow of cerebrospinal fluid to wash away harmful metabolic byproducts. There's more to sleep than, as was fashionable to think for a while, consolidation of memories into long-term storage. See http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... and several related papers.
** Having compete sleep cycles is more important than the exact time. If you look at various somnograms, you can see that the average sleep cycle (down to the deepest sleep stage then I again into REM) is around 90 minutes long, except the first sleep cycle of the night which is closer to 120 minutes (the 8 hour recommendation corresponds to five sleep cycles). It's worth making sure your alarm is set such that it doesn't wake you during a deep sleep stage of a cycle, because you'll wake feeling worse than even if you had woken up earlier at the end of the previous sleep cycle (during REM). This is why a half hour offset from your usual alarm time in either direction can potentially make a huge difference.
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Throw out your alarm clock. You'll quickly discover how much sleep you need.
Added benefit, you'll go to bed earlier and watch less TV/interwebs.
I suspect that the person from the modern world dropped into the jungle without notice would fare better than the hunter-gatherer dropped into the city or the suburbs without notice, especially if the modern person had experience with scouting as a kid or goes camping from time to time.
Don't get me wrong, they may still fare quite badly, but there's a much greater chance that they've been exposed to wilderness survival techniques than the hunter-gatherer has been exposed to that which is needed to integrate into a large populace.
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This is just my opinion.
Now, that disclaimer having been made: I'm going to tell you exactly, precisely, how much sleep you need every night.
You need exactly, precisely as much sleep as you need to sleep. If we could live in a world where you never had an alarm clock waking you up, and went to sleep when you wanted to go to sleep, allowing you to wake up naturally, you'd get exactly, precisely as much sleep as your body needed, every single night.
Saying 'you need eight hours sleep a night!' is like saying 'you need to drink at least eight glasses of water per day!'; it's hand-waving, it's one-size-fits-all, it's an over-simplification, and it's fundamentally flawed.
Unfortunately we live in a world where, unless you're independently wealthy and don't need to live on someone elses' imposed schedule, you need to get up at a specific time of the morning, and hustle to get to work on time. So in the end, it is what it is, and you get as much sleep as you can; maybe it's enough for you, maybe it's not. For me, anything less than six hours on a regular basis, and I start running into trouble, and if I'm sleeping more than 9 hours a night on a regular basis, I don't seem to have any energy and have problems getting moving once I'm out of bed. As described above, YMMV.
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