If you go to your doctor today and say that you have been waking up every night for weeks, there is a good chance that you will be diagnosed with insomnia and prescribed sleep medication. That was different until a few generations ago.
Waking up in the middle of the night was common, and perhaps even the norm, in Western pre-industrial cultures. This is stated by Roger Ekirch, professor of history at Virginia Tech in the United States. Ekirch conducted research into segmented sleep rhythms and wrote a book about it: At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past.
With a rhythm set by the sun instead of alarm clocks and electric lights, people in the past were likely to go to bed earlier. Their nights lasted longer, but they slept less. How exactly does that work?
What is polyphasic sleep?
Segmented sleep can consist of two sleep phases (biphasic) or multiple sleep phases (polyphasic). You are awake in between, from a few minutes to several hours. Research shows that more than 86 percent of mammalsincluding dogs, rodents, hedgehogs and even certain whales, spend their nights this way.
Until recently, it was assumed that people with their strictly monophasic sleep (one long sleep phase) were in the minority. That hypothesis is incorrect, says Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford.
Is polyphasic sleeping natural?
Historical sources provide proof: people already had biphasic sleep rhythms hundreds of years ago. According to Ekirch, people from Western pre-industrial civilizations always slept for a few hours, only to wake up again after midnight. In that hour or two there was time for meditation, sex, or social interaction. Then they crawled back into bed for a second sleep cycle.
How are things nowadays? There are experts who argue that the biphasic or polyphasic sleep rhythm is still in our nature. This also applies to Thomas Wehr, psychiatrist emeritus and scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health. Wehr conducted a groundbreaking study in 1992 where he had his respondents spend fourteen hours a day in a dark room. The result? Almost all participants had switched to a sleep rhythm consisting of several blocks within a few weeks.
Is monophasic sleeping natural?
Yet not everyone is convinced. Skeptics point to conflicting evidence found among groups of modern hunter-gatherers. Jerome Siegel, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, conducted research into hunter-gatherer communities in Tanzania, Bolivia and Namibia. His conclusion? Their sleep patterns looked suspiciously like those of people in post-industrial societies. So on ours.
Siegel reported that people from those various remote communities got approximately between 5.7 and 7.1 consecutive hours of sleep each night. “They have no electric light or heating, and their environment and social structures have been unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years,” he says. ‘Maybe there was a period in history when people woke up at night. But the fact that this was the universal pattern is not consistent with our data.’
Is it healthy to sleep polyphasically?
Opinions are divided as to whether polyphasic sleeping is natural. Would you like to try to change your sleep rhythm? In any case, do so responsibly.
Polyphasic sleeping is not a ‘biohack’ to get more hours in your day. So it is unwise to encourage your body to survive on less sleep. It would be wiser to see whether your biological clock might automatically start ticking differently if you go to bed earlier. Do you wake up on your own in the middle of the night, only to fall asleep again? Maybe polyphasic sleeping is something for you.
2024-01-20 09:51:43
#sleep #night
