The Myth of 8-Hour Sleep

Did you get your 8 hours of shuteye last night or did you spend the better part of the night wondering why conventional wisdom says you need 8 hours of sleep?

Stephanie Hegarty over at BBC News Magazine explores the concept of the eight-hour sleep, which is actually not how humans have been sleeping, historically speaking:

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. [...]

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.

Link


My schedules pretty flexible, so sometimes I'll do the afternoon nap thing. Mostly though, I drink so much coffee that I have enough trouble getting to sleep once a day, let alone trying for twice.
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I actually do the 2 sleep thing unintentionally. I'm generally asleep by 9.30pm, wake up around midnight, smoke - walk the dogs, then back to sleep until 6am. Its not by choice, my body just naturally energizes mid-slumber.It works for me though.
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Call me skeptical.

We don't go to bed saying to our bodies: "Ok body, no go to sleep for eight hours or else..." Or else what? We have no control over this. If our body wants to sleep for eight hours, it will. (Unless we interrupt it with an alarm clock.) If our body wants to sleep for six hours, it will. Etc.
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Why is it that so often it is assumed that what people used to do is the right thing to do? The "wisdom of the ancients" surely isn't all it's cracked up to be. People live longer and healthier lives than ever before and yet we are supposed to listen to the advice of people who had shorter and less healthy lives.
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For the most part I sleep when my body says and work when it is awake...I do not work outside the house either, and since staying awake nights is my bodies natural rhythm, I am able to honor that. I used to hate the process of waking up, but now that i am able to go with my own rhythm I don't mind it. I take a half hour to 2 hour nap in the evening, and when I wake up I get up and go.
sometimes, if I've only gotten 5 -6 hours of sleep for a few days at a time my body crashes and sleeps extra. It has to catch up sometimes so if you can, let it.
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I think two-sleep started to phase out when we started staying up later. Some days (maybe couple times a year) I am just so bushed I go straight to bed after work about 5pm then wake up at 10pm eat dinner and watch tv for a couple hours then back to bed until 6am.
I guess some days I just need ten hours of sleep.
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Maybe I should try this. I tend to go to bed around 10 or 11 and wake up around 2 or 3. Usually I just roll over and go back to sleep, but maybe I should get up and do something semi-productive.
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Having very few constraints in terms of daily obligations, I actually do this by default. I doze for a few hours in the evening, wake for an hour or two around midnight, and then sleep another few hours before waking a little after dawn. In the middle of the day, I might take a 45 minute nap. I feel far better on days that involve this sleep pattern than I do when I sleep the whole night through.
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I work from home and just sleep whenever I get tired, day or night. Great as that sounds, if I need to be somewhere for a particular time I have to plan ahead if my natural sleep cycle has started to cover the time that I need to be awake. Often in winter I don't see daylight because that's when I sleep and the days are so short!

I'm not sure I'd like to have two sleeps, mostly because I often feel like crap when I get out of bed so I'd rather not have to go through that twice in one day. Frequent naps though, but I was putting that down to age :)
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I learned about first and second sleep a few years ago. I did something similiar one summer but work hours make things difficult. Wish I could do it all the time. Stupid modern society. ;)
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