Interrupted Sleep Might Be The Best Kind

Monster

Monster

Part Of The Furniture
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Slashdot published following story :

"BBC reports that a growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that eight-hours of uninterrupted sleep may be unnatural as a wealth of historical evidence reveals that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks called first and second sleep. A book by historian Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, 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. 'It's not just the number of references — it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,' says Ekirch. References to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century with improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses — which were sometimes open all night. 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 which could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. 'Our pattern of consolidated sleep has been a relatively recent development, another product of the industrial age, while segmented sleep was long the natural form of our slumber, having a provenance as old as humankind,' says Ekrich, adding that we may 'choose to emulate our ancestors, for whom the dead of night, rather than being a source of dread, often afforded a welcome refuge from the regimen of daily life.'"
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I need about 8 hour of sleep to feel rested during the day, if not will feel sleepy, and then i will need a nap to refresh my mind and body from lack of sleep. When not able to take a nap, will be upset during the day.
 
Sometimes getting too much sleep can make me feel sleepy the next day. Oversleeping, like ten hours, can be too much.
 
I believe 8 hours is enough time to sleep during the night. Taking a nap will often cause me to feel sick for the rest of the day.
 
Even as the experts learn more and more about sleep, it will never be an exact science because everyone is different when it comes to sleep.
 
Hey, even physics isn't an exact science. ;)

The only halfways exact science is mathematics. ;)
 
I've always been an unusually deep sleeper. For example, when I was twelve years old, my grandfather fell down the stairs at my parents house in the middle of the night. Yet, despite the loud noise, I knew nothing about it until the next day.
 
Interesting! Never thought of interrupted sleep that way. I used to have very interrupted sleep when I was younger, but starting about last year or so, I have been sleeping much better, actually sleeping through the night with not much interruption. Lately, I have quit looking at the clock if I get up before my alarm, and that has helped greatly! I used to try to beat the alarm clock, because it sounds absolutely hideous, but now I just set my phone on a bearable sound and just let it wake me up. I have a bit of a quirk though, where I wake up in the middle of the night very very briefly- if I just keep my eyes shut, I fall back asleep in like, a minute.
Sleep can be a funny thing!
 
I tend to wake up several times in a night and then just roll over on my other side. I can count at least 8 to 10 in any given night and that could be higher as I'm half asleep when I do it. I wonder if it has to do with these new findings. I read that it's best to sleep 3 to 5 hours, then get up and do something for 30 minutes to an hour, then go back to sleep for the remainder, adding up to a total of 8 hours of cumulative sleep that night. I think I also have breathing problems when I sleep so that could have something to do with it too though.
 
It's not just about how many hours you sleep, but also how many hours you get of deep sleep. I've had days where I got my eight hours of sleep, but still felt tired. I didn't get the deep sleep I needed because of noise, light, etc.
 
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