“You need to get your 8 hours or you won’t be able to function tomorrow”. “I just couldn’t sleep last night, I kept waking up in the middle of the night”. Sound familiar? It’s been drummed into us from an early age that we need to get a set amount of sleep every night. And if you’ve ever struggled with your sleep or found it hard to establish a good sleeping pattern, you’ll know it can take over your life. However, you might be surprised to find out that humans are naturally geared to bi-phasic sleeping patterns.
The Effects of Not Sleeping Properly
You can feel groggy and unbalanced and barely able to get through the day if you don’t get enough sleep the night before. And let’s not even mention repeated episodes of insomnia. Insomnia can lead to all sorts of health issues, both mental and physical. But the thing is – if it’s so hard for some of us to get that 8 hours of kip each night, were we really meant to have this sleeping pattern in the first place?
What is Bi-Phasic or Segmented Sleep?
Interestingly, the answer is: probably not. It has been well documented throughout history that humans naturally sleep in two distinct chunks of time, not one solid 8-hour block. People would have a first sleep and a second sleep. In between these two four hour periods, there was a period of being awake for an hour or two in which people performed fairly normal tasks and got on with their day to day lives. This type of sleeping pattern is known as segmented sleep and it’s a bi-phasic pattern of rest.
Bi-phasic sleeping has been referenced in texts as early as the 14th Century. References to “first sleep” “second sleep” “deep sleep” and “morning sleep” can be found in a plethora of historical records and archival documents from the pre-Industrial age.
Research on Bi-Phasic Sleeping Patterns
And in fact, in 1990, a scientist named Thomas Wehr found that, when subjected to natural patterns of light and dark, humans naturally sleep in this bi-phasic way. This is therefore the default and normal sleeping pattern. So, next time you wake up in the middle of the night and curse your dreaded insomnia, just know that actually, you’re more normal than you might think.
I’m interested: are you a night owl or a lark?