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Maybe you don't have insomnia

terezosa / terriks

9 years ago

I was listening to NPR in the car the other day and learned something interesting. The idea of an uninterrupted 8 hours of sleep a night is a fairly modern concept.

It turns out that it's more natural to sleep a few hours, wake up for an hour or so, then sleep a few more hours. In fact in the past our ancestors referred to "first sleep" and "second sleep"

Here is a link that might be useful: The Myth of the 8 Hour Sleep

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Comments (9)

moonshadow
9 years ago
Fascinating read, thanks terriks!
deegw
9 years ago
I have heard that theory before. I used to be a modern sleeper and had no trouble sleeping 8 or 9 hours straight. Post meno, I now sleep for 4 or 5 hours, wake and gnaw on my worries for an hour or two and then sleep for two more hours. I like the modern sleep better.
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User
9 years ago
And naps. A 20-minute nap during the day promotes health as well. Europe has siestas. Americans need to chill a bit more.
User
9 years ago
The older I get the less 'modern' sleeper I become.

Lately I have been having a hard time falling asleep. At times I have l lain in bed for 3 hours or more without falling asleep. Very frustrating.
I actually went to the drugstore and bought a bottle of melatonin but then returned it because the lowest dose I could find was 3 mg and I read that is too much. I have been practicing breathing methods, that helps sometimes. DH falls asleep within seconds!
outsideplaying_gw
9 years ago
Interesting. I guess I used to be a more modern sleeper too. I almost always wake up around the same time every night. Usually I go right back to sleep but ever since meno I have more trouble sometimes. And then there are those nights where I have to just read a book for a while. Usually have no trouble falling asleep, it's the STAYING asleep that's the problem. And now this DST-back-to-Standard Time adjustment thing.
debrak2008
9 years ago
I always like taking a short nap at about 3 pm each day. I rarely get to do that but it always is refreshing.
violetwest
9 years ago
I've known about this for a while, and it's a really interesting idea to think of those medieval people visiting other in the middle of the night, etc. But I think it's probably just as much of a cultural construct as our current "8 hours of uninterrupted sleep."
terezosa / terriks
Original Author
9 years ago
Actually a study was done to see how people sleep without the interruption of modern artificial lighting:

In the 1990s, a sleep scientist named Thomas Wehr discovered that everyone sleeps biphasically when subjected to natural patterns of light and dark. In Wehr's well-known study, he subjected participants to 14 hours of darkness per night, and found that they gradually shifted to a routine of taking two hours to fall asleep, then sleeping in two four-hour phases separated by about an hour of wakefulnes - "a pattern that exactly matched Ekirch's historical findings.

As I have gotten older I also tend to wake a few hours after I fall asleep. I'm awake for a while, then fall back asleep for a few hours. It's comforting for me to know that it's nothing to freak out about, that it's actually a natural human sleep pattern.

Here is a link that might be useful: Biphasic sleep study info
Annie Deighnaugh
9 years ago
I've heard this before. The problem was for me, when I was working, that I'd wake up at 3 am and it'd take me 2 hrs to bet back to sleep, but I had to get up at 5 am to go to work so I was basically SOL.

Now that I'm retired, it's not a problem. Though I do find I sleep 6 hrs and then wake up with a hot flash...

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