Rethinking Sleep

[Gumby]

Fascinating...

The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways.

[...]

One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,”? for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.”? A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep”? and the “second sleep”? was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep”? to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.

It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opini ... sleep.html

Read More: NYTimes: Rethinking Sleep

[dualstow]

I read the article.
I get about 6 hours a night if I'm lucky and if I ended caffeine intake by 2:00PM, and all I want is that outdated eight-hour block of sleep. As a matter of fact, I would hibernate through the winter if I could. I'd just need to make my wife promise to turn the lights off once in a while.

[Coffee]

I've tried experimenting with sleep.  Tim Ferriss has a section in his 4-Hour Body book about it. 

The biggest problem is that you end up on a cycle that the rest of the world is not on.  Which might be fine if you're a hermit.

I typically get up after 6 1/2 hours of sleep.  I think mostly because of stress.  When I was a kid, I could sleep 11+ hours straight.

[Gumby]

Found this on Google Books from 1837...

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[align=center]Source: The Idler, and breakfast-table companion, Volume 1 (1837)[/align]

[Benko]

There have been sleep studies where they put people in rooms isolated from any time clues or clues as to light/dark outside and I remember that many people have natural sleep/wake cycles that do not coincide to 24 hours i.e. their total of sleep+ wakefulness was more or less than 24 hours.  I don't remember any more, but those studies should be easy to dig up and see if "it is natural" for the body to sleep in several broken up periods.

[MachineGhost]

There have been sleep studies where they put people in rooms isolated from any time clues or clues as to light/dark outside and I remember that many people have natural sleep/wake cycles that do not coincide to 24 hours i.e. their total of sleep+ wakefulness was more or less than 24 hours.  I don't remember any more, but those studies should be easy to dig up and see if "it is natural" for the body to sleep in several broken up periods.

Its probably the lunar cycle, which is about 1 hour short of 24.  Eacy day you will become more and more out of sync.  I notice this happening when I get sick of following a schedule (which is often) and just do a free for all.

My favorite time is Hacker's Lunch (3am) and Demon's Hour (3:33am).  Huge ratio of concentration vs distraction.

[MediumTex]

If I could fashion my own schedule, I would probably sleep from 6:00-8:00pm, engage in recreation from 8:00-10:30, work from 10:30-3:30, sleep from 3:30-10:30, engage in recreation from 10:30-12:30, work from 12:30-4:30, engage in recreation from 4:30-6:00 and then get ready for my two hour nap before I started a new day.

For me, there is nothing like the late night for work that requires mental calm and clarity.

[WiseOne]

I don't have the exact reference, but the experiment Benko is referring to resulted in 25-26 hour days.

There's also evidence that we're hardwired to take an afternoon nap.  There was a great study of highway auto accidents sorted by hour of the day.  Accidents were lowest in the morning, higher overnight, and there was a spike in accident rate around 4pm.  The spike was over by 5 or 6pm, so it wasn't explained by rush hour traffic.  Coincidentally, 4pm is around the time of afternoon tea in the UK.

The afternoon nap disappeared at the start of the Industrial Revolution, because it didn't fit well with factory work schedules.  I wonder if it's making a comeback in the early retirement community?