Hey there, been getting a lot of questions about the recent BBC piece on sleep. If you have not read that yet please do and then skeedadle back here.
So, the thrust of the piece is that “normal” human sleep (both from a research perspective and anthropological observations) is NOT a solid, 8 hour block. Research and anthropological observation indicates people should experience alternating periods of waking and sleeping. The article makes the point that many people experience “sleep anxiety” when they awake at night and then fret that they will not get back to sleep.
Ok. This article seems to have really spun people up and it’s produced not much more than a shrug for me. Why? Because instead of thinking about all this as an isolated concept I’m thinking about it from the larger evolutionary biology context (plus factoring in what I know about sleep research). Let’s revisit the opening section of that BBC piece:
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 had 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.