I can certainly identify with this article on sleep. The 8-hour sleep myth: How I learned that everything I knew about sleep was wrong. Now unlike the author I have rarely slept more than six hours a night for decades.
Pursuing the truth about sleep means winding your way through a labyrinth of science, consumerism and myth. Researchers have had barely a clue about what constitutes “normal” sleep. Is it how many hours you sleep? A certain amount of time in a particular phase? The pharmaceutical industry recommends drug-induced oblivion, which, it turns out, doesn’t even work. The average time spent sleeping increases by only a few minutes with the use of prescription sleep aids. And — surprise! — doctors have just linked sleeping pills to cancer. We have memory foam mattresses, sleep clinics, hotel pillow concierges, and countless others strategies to put us to bed. And yet we complain about sleep more than ever.
The blame for modern sleep disorders is usually laid at the doorstep of Thomas Edison, whose electric light bulb turned the night from a time of rest to one of potentially endless activity and work. Proponents of the rising industrial culture further pushed the emphasis of work over rest, and the sense of sleep as lazy indulgence.
But there’s something else, which I learned recently while engaged in a bout of insomnia-driven Googling. A Feb. 12, 2012 article on the BBC Web site, “The Myth of the 8-Hour Sleep,” has permanently altered the way I think about sleep. It proclaimed something that the body had always intuited, even as the mind floundered helplessly.
But this is nothing new. Like Madison avenue has managed to convince us that we stink without their “hygiene” products they have also managed to convince us that we need to use their sleep aids so we can get 8 hours of sleep. I usually sleep about four hours then wake up and read for an hour or two and then go back to sleep for a couple of hours. As it turns out this is normal.
Turns out that psychiatrist Thomas Wehr ran an experiment back in the ‘90s in which people were thrust into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. When their sleep regulated, a strange pattern emerged. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before drifting off again into a second four-hour sleep.
Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech would not have been surprised by this pattern. In 2001, he published a groundbreaking paper based on 16 years of research, which revealed something quite amazing: humans did not evolve to sleep through the night in one solid chunk. Until very recently, they slept in two stages. Shazam.
In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Ekrich presents over 500 references to these two distinct sleep periods, known as the “first sleep” and the “second sleep,” culled from diaries, court records, medical manuals, anthropological studies, and literature, including The Odyssey. Like an astrolabe pointing to some forgotten star, these accounts referenced a first sleep that began two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
So good news – I’m not a weirdo. This did lead to some problems. My X wife zonked out for eight hours or more straight while I woke up in the middle of the night. She actually slept through a couple of earthquakes. I would be forced to go to the living room to read. Today I either read or log onto the internet although it’s usually pretty quite in the middle of the night. I have been single for years and those nighttime waking hours have become precious moments. Well it’s off to bed for the first sleep now, maybe I will talk to you again in four hours.