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...

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

But, when quantified over a meaningful time span, which is worse? At the age of 60, if you sleep for 8 hours a day, you'll have slept for 20 years. Do you enjoy those extra years more than you regret the damage done? Quantify that if you want to make an authoritative statement.

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I would imagine hunter/gather tribes solve more complex tasks in a day than the average citizen of a modern Western country--their survival depends on it whereas most of us can smoke weed and drink booze all day knowing we'll still be able to find our next meal easily enough. Reading about the Kardashians, posting on facebook, and watching reality TV isn't exactly intellectually stimulating.

5.7-7.1 hours of DEEP SLEEP.

[denzacar]

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.

Alarm clocks are what are ruining sleep

[kheldan]

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.