"We often worry about lying awake
in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing
body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the
eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
"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 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…."
snip
"…Today, most people seem
to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes
many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body’s natural
preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial
light.
"This could be the root of a condition called sleep
maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have
trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.
"The condition first
appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time
as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.
“For most of evolution
we slept a certain way,” says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. “Waking
up during the night is part of normal human physiology.”
"The
idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he
says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety
can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life
too....."
http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-broken-sleep-is-a-golden-time-for-creativity/
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
http://beyondmeds.com/2014/11/07/broken-sleep-the-upside-of-waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night/
Comment:
unspoken is the need to make sure that you schedule your
sleep/awake/sleep times and activities to allow for a sufficient total
to be rested
