Dream Practice: Myth of the 8 Hour Sleep Need (very interesting research)

*THE MYTH OF THE EIGHT-HOUR SLEEP*
By Stephanie Hegarty
BBC World Service
February 22, 2012

http://nhne-pulse.org/the-myth-of-the-eight-hour-sleep/

Original Link <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783>

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night — but it
could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and
history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in
which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every
day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the
subjects settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first
for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a
second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general
public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

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.

And these hours weren’t entirely solitary — people often chatted to
bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the
best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but
“after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

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.

He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting,
domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses — which were sometimes
open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and
as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to
rest dwindled.

In his new book, Evening’s Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts
forward an account of how this happened.

“Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good,” he
says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute —
criminals, prostitutes and drunks.

“Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to
spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated
with staying up all night.”

That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation.
Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services
at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had
belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to
exploiting the hours of darkness.

This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who
could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting,
however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.

In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets,
using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same
year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient
oil-powered lamp was developed.

London didn’t join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century,
more than 50 of Europe’s major towns and cities were lit at night.

Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered
a waste of time.

“People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to
efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century,” says Roger Ekirch. “But
the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds.”

Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical
journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a
pattern of first and second sleep.

“If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further
repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have
caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.

“And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will
be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to
their credit.”

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour
sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the
human body’s natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the
ubiquity of artificial light.

This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia,
where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to
sleep, he suggests.

The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th
Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.

“For most of evolution we slept a certain way,” says sleep psychologist
Gregg Jacobs. “Waking up during the night is part of normal human
physiology.”

The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging,
he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this
anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking
life too.

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at
Oxford, shares this point of view.

“Many people wake up at night and panic,” he says. “I tell them that
what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”

But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a
consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

“Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem
directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical
training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,” he says.

Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were
forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an
important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.

In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to
meditate on their dreams.

“Today we spend less time doing those things,” says Dr Jacobs. “It’s not
a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report
anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up.”

So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your
pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.

………………

*When Segmented Sleep Was The Norm*

/”He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first
sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some
object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of
his dream.”/

— Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)

…

/”Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep,
did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the
first lasted him from night to morning.”/

— Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)

…

/”And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke
made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a
slake.”/

— Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale

…

The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms “first sleep” and “second
sleep” to refer to specific periods of the night.

………………

*Stages of sleep*

Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep.

Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping –
breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops.

Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep – you may feel awake and this means
that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it.

Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep – it is very hard to wake up from
Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity
in your body.

After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then
enter Dream Sleep – also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – which,
as its name suggests, is when you dream.

In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep
from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before
entering dream sleep.