Um… ok. I would also imagine Tacitus and Pliny didn’t play on their X-Boxes either.
Not quite sure what your point is. It’s clear from the descriptions that people would do whatever it was popular to do in the middle of the night during their era.
Regardless of what people did, the split sleep pattern was so normal as to be part of the language from Roman times (“concubia nocte”), via special prayers prescribed for it in the 16th C, through to the time of Pepys, in which they did in fact have tobacco - right into modern times:
I’m not the one making a specific argument that it’s ‘natural’, but it’s certainly a phenomenon that has been recorded for more than two thousand years in many different cultures and societies, but has died out in most places in modern times.
I think your body just uses what it has, and no cycle is more “natural” than another as long as you’re getting enough rest.
If I napped when I wanted (after lunch) and retired to bed when I wanted (right after dinner), I’d awaken refreshed from 12am-2am every night.
But really, why would this be “healthier”? Would it be because I’m sleeping in ideal sleep patterns, or am I sleeping in ideal sleep patterns because I’m living an ideal life? (i.e.no demanding job that frowns on afternoon naps, kids with civilized sleep patterns, a spouse with the sense to stop reading and turn the damned lights off at a reasonable hour.)
Come to think of it, are children considered natural? If so, then it’s also perfectly natural for parents to have fragmented, inadequate sleep during that glorious time of one’s life.
I’ve felt it was not natural for a long time. Observing animals I see that they alternate between several periods of sleep and wakefulness.
When I was in college I usually slept about 4 hours a night and then also napped several times a day. It was a pattern that worked well for me at the time.
I read this article and immediately stopped getting pissed at waking up in the middle of the night and then struggling to get back to sleep.
now if I wake up I get a drink, grab a book or maybe watch a TTC lecture on my phone before drifting back off again.
life has improved quite a bit in the sleep department after reading this.
Wonderfully liberating, isn’t it? I first read it about a month ago, and the next time I awoke in the middle of the night I thought “no worries, just my First Sleep”, had a piss, drink of water, read a book, then fell back to sleep again for my second - extremely satisfying - sleep.
This rethink has also encouraged me to go to bed earlier so that I can fit in roughly 2 x 4-hour blocks with an hour or so in between.
I have shared a link to this thread with my husband whose insomnia looks pretty much exactly like what is described. He falls asleep. Sleeps for about 4 hours and then wakes up for 1-2 hours and then comes back to bed for a few more hours.
He feels terrible on those days after he’s been up in the night but I wonder if it’s not so much that he’s sleep deprived but that he thinks he’s sleep deprived.
Maybe a shift in perspective would be a good thing for him.
Also, when he’s awake at night he sits at the computer and plays games (solitaire and majong) until he’s sleepy. I often wonder if the artificial light from the computer screen doesn’t exacerbate the situation. Maybe he’d be better off to sit in his easy chair and listen to music or read when he’s up at night.
This more or less describes my typical sleep pattern. Most days after I get home, I’ll end up taking an extended nap usually 1-2 hours then be awake for a few hours, then go back to bed for another 4-5 hours. I usually feel more rested after that than a straight 7-8 hours.
i’ve read a lot about polyphasic sleep patterns. i’d love to get into that routine.
as it stands, i’m on a 36 hour cycle. when i have no scheduled engagements and just sleep as i want, that’s what i do: i’m awake around 24 hrs and sleep 12. i’m more creative, alert, productive and happy.
it is, however, fairly impossible to live a normal life this way. most people need things done at certain times or want to meet during reasonable hours. it’s weird to be going to bed at 10 am and sleeping til midnight…but i swear it’s what my body wants.
sleep is the biggest problem i’ve ever faced. i spend nearly every moment of my life either trying to sleep, wishing i was asleep, being tired or being asleep. i’m hardly ever at stasis.
This is actually exactly what I thought had been done when I first learned about this study, and what I hope does eventually occur. Even being just slightly inferior would be great for insomniacs.
One tweak I would make that would allow the study to involve fewer people (assuming that’s easier): let the people be their own controls. First get them a normal sleep pattern of eight hours a night, study that, and then change their sleep pattern, and study that. Then, just to be sure, have them switch back and study that. If
All of that said, I’ve heard for a long time that it’s no big deal if you wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep. Back when I first was getting off my medicine and having insomnia, it was very comforting to find that advice on websites about sleep disorders. Now sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and sometimes I don’t, and I don’t even think about it. And I have to say, I’ve never noticed any difference in how tired I am, one way or the other.
Then again, you get your highest quality sleep in the first four hours.
I imagine that in European countries, this pattern would have been common in half the year, and not so common the other half. Of course this wouldn’t apply to Cameroon, which is nearer the equator. But from what I recall in Aberdeen, high summer “night” was from about 10 or 11 pm till about 3 or 4 next morning - just about time enough to get one decent slug of sleep before heading out to the fields again to pull up potatoes all day.
By about September they must have been really hanging out for a nice long night again.
I’m not sure it’s a great revelation really. Most people seem to like a nap around or after lunch time, the issue is the inflexibility of the capitalist workplace, whether a 1920s Ford production line or a modern office or shop - 9/10 hours working plus 1/2 more commuting… square pegs, round holes.
I had. In Spanish the “first sleep/dream” is the deep sleep you get for the first couple of hours or so after falling asleep; the rest is the “second sleep/dreams” (the word for sleep and dream is the same in this context, sueño). Tradition has it that being awakened during the “first sleep” will leave you groggy for the next day no matter how much you manage to sleep afterwards.
Different people have different sleep patterns: same as there are morning vs afternoon vs night people, there are people whose sleep falls into a few hours in the wee hours plus a long nap after lunch (my merchant captain uncle called this “sailor’s style”, because that’s how sailors need to sleep due to how their work shifts are split), others who sleep in a single 6-8h chunk (that would be me for example), others who wake up during the witching hour (my mother has done so since her mid-teens).
Picking one pattern and saying “this one is the natural way!” is as absurd as declaring anybody whose natural waking hours do not match those of the pickers and declaring them un-natural. There is no single natural way, it changes from person to person.
You appear to have some bias creeping into your expression here. Farmers in agrarian societies would often have to work from sunup until just before sundown as well, it’s certainly not anything inherent in a “capitalist workplace”.
I think conforming to a daytime work schedule is pretty common as soon as we move beyond the hunter-gatherer model of civilization.
I can’t accept that. If working hours are set by the necessities of season and daylight it doesn’t add anything to the debate. Plus, if you work the hours you describe, it really isn’t too many days before the law of diminishing return sets in.
Any hunter or fisherman will tell you that you have to be up before the crack of dawn - poised and ready whent he first rays come over the horizon - if you want to eat well. Otherwise it could take all day to get one fish. Same goes for gathering, where you are competing with the birds for the ripe fruits and grains. If anything, I would think the siesta model would be the optimum for hunter/gatherer groups.
[QUOTE=jjimm quoted]
Of the Tiv in central Nigeria, a study in 1969 recorded, “At night, they wake when they will and talk with anyone else awake in the hut.”
[/QUOTE]
And I assume they would BS and poke the fire, even if it didn’t need poking. I mean, that’s what we did as Boy Scouts. The dead of night was also made for handing down tribal folklore, especially scary stories.
Pre Industrial revolution, you can bet that working hours were set by the sunlight. Hard to plow a field correctly, or work a forge properly, in the darkness.
And farming, remember, used to be a seasonal job. You would work hard, VERY hard for about 2/3 of the year. Back breaking physical labor, damn near all day, damn near every day. Just because you and I no longer work 10-12 hour days regularly doesn’t mean it can’t be done. We are sissies compared to our forebears, and soft.
But, we are better educated, and live a longer life, largely due to not having to work in such a grueling fashion anymore.