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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.)
"Tanzania, San in Namibia, and Tsimane in Bolivia"
If I would live on or near the equator, where the sun goes up at 4:30 I'd get up early as well.
People living more to the North or South may have to stay in bed for much longer.
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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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...
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
There's also evidence that our "natural" sleep pattern is two segments per night: first a "deep" sleep, followed by a midnight wakeful period called a "watch" (or "vigil" in Latin), and then a second sleep segment in the wee hours before dawn. This pattern was interrupted by the spread of artificial lighting technology in recent centuries, which allowed people to stay up and be productive when it would otherwise have been too dark. Apparently the practice of sleeping through the night in one go is a fairly recent development.
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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.
They sleep 7-8.5 hours a day, have long siestas and take naps.
NPR article's author misunderstood the original article due to ignorance of the topic he chose to write about.
The team asked 94 people from these groups to wear Actiwatch-2 devices, which automatically recorded their activity and ambient-light levels.
The data revealed that these groups all sleep for nightly blocks of 6.9 and 8.5 hours, and they spend at least 5.7 to 7.1 hours of those soundly asleep.
That's no more than what Westerners who have worn the same watches get; if anything, it's slightly less.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Bathing or showering can also be harmful. Every time you clean your skin, you are eroding one protective sheet of your skin. Add chemicals on top of that! Isn't the real world scary?
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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