![]() Most humans feel much more comfortable sleeping at night than during the day, due to the influence of environmental factors. During this cycle, a living creature has higher or lower energy levels and differing behaviours, depending upon the time of day. The circadian rhythm is a recurring 24-hour cycle that occurs across almost every species on Earth. Why Do Some People Sleep Later Than Others? There are also many self-help articles aiming toward adjusting a sleep schedule towards more "appropriate" nighttime hours. Some influencing factors in this are environmental (such as culture or lifestyle), but there is also a genetic component at play.ĭespite this, there is a plethora of discussion around whether sleeping late negatively affects health. Scientists now believe it is as natural to have a later sleep schedule as it is to prefer tea over coffee. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter nattyover.Sleep schedules differ just as much as personal preferences do. This article was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to. "It may be normal sleep." Ekirch added, "If people don't fight it, they'll find themselves falling asleep again after roughly one hour." "Waking up after a couple of hours may not be insomnia," wrote Wehr. In other words, if you wake up in the night, don't worry about it. "If they perceive interrupted sleep as normal, they experience less distress when they wake at night, and fall back to sleep more easily." Clinical psychiatrists are finding that if they can make their insomnia patients stop seeing their sleep as problematic, their condition becomes more tolerable. Sleep specialists share this assumption."īut, Brown wrote, this is changing. The general public seems to regard 7 to 8 hours of unbroken sleep as a birthright anything less means that something is awry. According to a recent article in Psychiatric Times by Walter Brown, a psychiatrist at Brown Medical School, "Working against the clinical application of findings is the extent to which they fly in the face of current thinking. However, the behavioral paradigm shift has been slow to take hold. Wehr's and Ekirch's results are becoming more and more widely known, and psychiatrists and sleep specialists are beginning to implement them. So in short, we have lost what people in the past regarded as a critically important part of their lives – their dream life." The light goes on and we get out of bed immediately. "With morning dreams we don't have the opportunity to let our dreams settle. "Waking up directly after dreaming afforded people a pathway to their subconscious," he said. ![]() According to Ekirch, the historical evidence bears that out. Wehr's study subjects normally awakened from REM sleep, which is the deep sleep stage during which dreams occur. One benefit of biphasic sleeping may be that it makes it easier to recall and access dreams. He also inferred that modern humans are chronically sleep-deprived, which may be why we usually take only 15 minutes to fall asleep, and why we try our best not to wake up in the night. Wehr concluded that biphasic sleeping is the most natural sleep pattern, and is actually beneficial, rather than a form of insomnia. In Wehr's well-known study, he subjected participants to 14 hours of darkness per night, and found that they gradually shifted to a routine of taking two hours to fall asleep, then sleeping in two four-hour phases separated by about an hour of wakefulness-a pattern that exactly matched Ekirch's historical findings. In the 1990s, a sleep scientist named Thomas Wehr discovered that everyone sleeps biphasically when subjected to natural patterns of light and dark. "But people with particularly strong circadian rhythms continue to ," said Ekirch. Now, "normal" sleep requires forgoing the periods of wakefulness that used to break up the night we simply don't have time for a midnight chat with the neighbor any longer. At the same time, it has cut nighttime short, and so to get enough sleep we now have to do it all in one go. ![]() In places with electricity, though, artificial lighting has prolonged our experience of daylight, allowing us to be productive for longer. Segmented or biphasic sleep patterns evolved to fill the long stretch of nighttime, and as observed by anthropologists, segmented sleep continues to be the norm for many people in undeveloped parts of the world, such as the Tiv group in Central Nigeria. ![]() Except for those affluent enough to burn candles for hours, folks were left with little to do but go to bed early, and this gave a great deal of flexibility to their nightly sleep requirements. You can blame the shift in your sleeping habits on Thomas Edison's lightbulb and the Industrial Revolution.Įkirch explained that in the past, and especially during winter, darkness spanned up to 14 hours each night. ![]()
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