…and second sleep? This is fascinating.
I often do wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. I generally do after an hour or two, but it means I don’t get enough sleep the second time, because I have to get up for work. Who knew that this was natural? The problem is that you really have to get to bed early in order to do it, because it means you need ten consecutive hours to get your sleep instead of eight. I found this interesting, too, and completely unsurprising:
…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.
So doctors are as ignorant about the science of sleep as they are about nutrition.
There was a very similar piece in Science News about a decade ago. A single eight-hour sleep is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution. It’ll be interesting to see what changes as telecommuting becomes the norm for most employed people.
Separately, I strongly recommend The Promise of Sleep for anyone experiencing sleep disorders.
I worked rotating shift work for 6 years. It’s very hard on the body (I swear it aged me at least 12 years) because I was constantly having to change my sleep schedule as often as every other day. I called it “perpetual jetlag.” I found that when working mid-shifts, what worked best for me was to try and get an hour or two of sleep before going in to work and them sleeping 4-5 hours the next morning. I seldom needed to get a full 8 hours of sleep in any 24 hour period, which was good because I seldom had that much time.
Now that I’m a “man of a certain age”, I find myself frequently waking up at night for other reasons. Not drinking anything for a few hours before going to bed helps but if I wake up, relieving myself is necessary or I can’t get back to sleep.
I did something like that for a year or so, although not as extreme: 3 days on first shift, 2 on 3rd; on nights when I worked third I tended to go home, eat, sleep for a few hours, then get up for most of the day, and then get a couple extra hours before going back in. It felt more natural than a straight 8 hours.
Over my years of shift work, I was on several different rotational scheduled. A lot depended on whether we had 4 or 5 crews for the rotation, with 5 crews being much easier. The worst schedule I worked was also the first. We called it “doublebacks”. It went like this:
Shift 1: Mids (0000-0800)
Shift 2: Mids (0000-0800)
Shift 3: Swings (1600-0000) on same day as Shift 2 (doubleback)
Shift 4: Swings (1600-0000)
Shift 5: Days (0800-1600) 8 hours after completing Shift 4 (doubleback)
Shift 6: Days (0800-1600)
Two days off then repeat. I worked this schedule for 16 months and was tired and sick much of the time. I missed a lot of sleep and meals during that time. Whenever we tried to discuss changing the rotation schedule, our NCOIC (who worked M-F days) would drag out an even worse schedule. Finally, we got a break when the SOB had a heart attack and had to medically retire. Our new NCOIC was more reasonable and we went to a much better schedule.
It’s just another application of the 80/20 rule. 80% of doctors are quacks and the other 20% don’t have a clue.
The average doctor is ignorant of the details and significant science behind pretty much everything except anatomy, common diseases, and whatever the specialty they trained in is (and even then, probably only at the level of knowledge it was when they trained).
How do I know? From watching people go through medical school and becoming doctors.
This is not meant as an insult to doctors (learning what they do know is a significant feat, and nobody can be an expert in every specialty!), but as a counter to the idea that getting an MD means knowing Everything About Health.
(It is meant as an attack on those doctors who think that the MD means that they do know Everything About Health.)
Hobbits have a second breakfast, so maybe they know more about better sleep rhythms than us.
Yeah I want my elevenses!
Let me add to Jay’s recommendation of the book The Promise of Sleep (an excellent book by the way) Stanley Coren’s Sleep Thieves. Given the usual topics on Rand’s board, you may be surprised to find out that the Challenger launch decision was made by people who had entirely too little sleep.
Too many Americans especially today ignore the human need for sleep. It’s causing problems in a wide variety of areas. Some of the mess in DC can be attributed to people on both sides of the political aisle not getting enough sleep.
I’ve long been aware of the two-sleep pattern common in the Roman Republic, and later the empire.
I’ve long had insomnia; I just cannot sleep until I feel like it, and if I have something important the following morning (even something good, like the start of a vacation trip) I cannot sleep.
About four years ago, I gave up and said the hell with it. I’m both single and self employed (and my work is usually not dependent upon being done in specific hours) so I was not as constrained by necessity as many.
It turned into an experiment. It seems I have two natural cycles. The first is a few hours of sleep after my main meal of the day, then about six hours later, a few more hours of sleep.
At other times, I do better when I follow a 25 to 26 hour “day” so my sleep time keeps getting later by an hour or so per day.
The one that works best for me overall is the nap-plus shorter sleep cycle, but time-shifted. I have a “nap” from around 7pm to 11pm, then sleep again from about 7am to just after noon. Works great, but it has the drawback of social stigma via admitting you sleep until noon. Fortunately, I don’t care about social stigma.
I still have trouble sleeping when I need to, and basically my strategy is, when I can, sleep on need and not be governed by clocks. It’s not the best, but it’s helped me deal with insomnia.
In those days of fierce programming when I was completely decoupled from the diurnal cycle, I found that I settled pretty reliably into a 28 hour pattern: sleeping around 10 hours and up for 18. This varied over time to as much as 12 sleep / awake 16. I’ve heard that experiments in which people lived in caves totally cut off from external stimuli ended up on a similar cycle. I dimly recall a science fiction story or maybe a speculative article in Analog or one of the other magazines which said this was evidence we’d originally evolved on a planet with a longer day.
Can anybody recall the citation?
I read this article last night. I found it absolutely fascinating.
My “normal” sleep pattern is exactly like this. I’m literally unable to sleep more than 4-5 hours at a stretch. For the longest time I thought there was something wrong with me, since I never get eight hours of sleep at night.
Usually I’ll stay up till 2:00 a.m. or so, then sleep until my alarm sounds at 7:00. Sometimes I get tired and go to bed early, say 11:00 or 12:00. Then I wake up at 3:00 or 4:00, surf the web for awhile, and try to catch a little more sleep at 5:00 or 6:00. When this happens, I sometimes sleep right through the alarm and am late for work.
The absolute worst is waking up at around 5:30 or 6:00. By the time 7:00 rolls around, I want nothing more than to be able to go back to bed.
So I guess my choices are to either settle for one sleep period (which I usually do), or else go to bed extra early to allow for two full sleep periods. That’s no fun. I’m just not tired at 9:00 or 10:00. But our ancestors who hunted and gathered, or who worked on farms certainly would have been.
When I was younger, especially after just a few months in the Navy, I could sleep anywhere, anytime. I could get up from sleeping 10 hours, eat some toast and take a nap. Of course I could stay up for 30 hrs working too.
I did a lot slower after about 18 or 20 hours.
After I became a civilian again, I ‘lost’ that. Even in my mid-30’s I got to where I just didn’t sleep that good. to this day, if I sleep 4 or 5 hours wake up for an hour and THEN sleep 3 hours, the only sleep that ‘takes’ is that 3 hours.
Some nights I’ve decided to just stay up, I feel better after being up for 28 or 30 hours straight, instead of trying to play catch up.
Wow, I never really gave this much thought, other than in college ten years back. Now, in my 30s, I find I need a solid 8-9 hours in a row, and then I’ll be very active and alert the whole day. To be honest, though, I would love to be one of those people who can get by on just six. My wife is like this and it’s been a source of friction for seven years now.