The Myth of the Eight Hour Sleep

We were told by our mothers and our teachers that it was essential to have an eight hour stretch of sleep per night. Modern researchers have shed new light on such ideas regarding sleep pattern revealing many new things, while this article by Stephanie Hegarty (BBC World Service) combines research with historical writings to argue that perhaps interrupted sleep cycles might be good for you.

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 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. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened. 

"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.

"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."

That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.

This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes. In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night. Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.

"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds."

Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.

"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.

"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

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.

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.

"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."

But 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.

Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.

In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.

"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up."

So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.

Full article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

The Alarm Clock for the Perfect Night's Sleep?

Being woken up at the wrong time can be a horrible feeling. You feel un-rested and wake up feeling grumpy to start the day on the wrong foot from the off. You want to throw your alarm clock out the window or berate the caring person who had kindly agreed to wake you up. Yet at other times you awaken feeling refreshed and ready to go despite perhaps only sleeping a few hours - why is this? Is there something that could be done to ensure a refreshing wake up every day? Perhaps this new alarm clock is the answer... Article taken from:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111020105800.htm

Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology the researchers describe an alarm clock that monitors your brain activity and triggers its alarm within a time window you set in advance but only when your brain is in a more easily roused state rather than deep sleep.

"By using such an alarm clock, the user will wake feeling much more refreshed than if they were awakened by a conventional alarm clock that rings at a set time," explains Jemina Asnoth Sylvia of Jerusalem College of Engineering in Tamil Nadu.

Sleep is a behavioural state that is a natural part of every individual's life. We spend about one-third of our lives asleep. Although the precise functions of sleep remain a mystery, sleep is important for normal motor and cognitive functions as well as growth and rejuvenation of the immune, nervous, skeletal and muscular systems. After waking naturally, we recognize changes that have occurred, as we feel rested and more alert. However, many people use an alarm clock to wake them at a set time, which is when problems occur for some of us.

The researchers point out that sleep usually involves 90-minute cycles of brain activity during which there are periods when the brain is most arousable. If a person is woken, from a night's sleep, during such an arousable period in the cycle, they will feel more refreshed than if they are woken during a deeper part of the sleep cycle. To take advantage of this requires putting EEG scalp electrodes on the head to monitor brain activity and to hook the output to a modified alarm clock. Once out of the experimental stage, the team envisages a head-band worn while sleeping that uses wireless electrodes.

In tests, the alarm time is set and the monitoring process is set to begin 90 seconds before the alarm time. An on board computer determines what stage of their brain activity cycle the sleeper is in during the 90-second monitoring time. If they are in the 3rd or 4th stage of sleep, the alarm is "snoozed" automatically. However, if they are in stage 1 or 2 of sleep, the more arousable stages, the alarm is sounded to wake the sleeper.

The team adds that it is feasible to record brain activity during the night to obtain a so-called "hypnogram" to determine how well you are sleeping overall. This would allow you to adjust your alarm time so that the monitoring window coincided more often with stage 1 or 2. That might mean an earlier alarm call, up to 45 minutes earlier, but it would be a gentler more refreshed awakening. Of course, the converse would also be possible -- a "snooze" or 45 minutes and an even more rested and refreshed awakening. Just don't blame the researchers if you are late for work!

What are Dreams...and What do they Mean?

What are dreams? What do my dreams mean? What are my dreams telling me? These are very common questions we ask ourselves, from early childhood right through our lives in all likelihood. They scare us, they excite us, they inspire us, they can confuse us altogether...but why are dreams such a mystery?

Dreams have been studied and considered for thousands of years, but the truth is there are still not many ‘hard facts’ about dreams as science has not yet found a way to accurately measure their content, and is the reason why we have to rely on theories to explain something that plays such a strange role in our lives. It has been said that we spend around 6 years of our lives in dreaming state, a state often feeling so real we have no idea we are dreaming until we wake up. In dreams we feel pain, pleasure, fear, happiness – in fact every emotion possible in a form as real as we would in our ordinary waking life. The question is why do we feel these things and can these dreams have meaning?

The brain has been studied rigorously when asleep, with brainwaves being recorded through our 8 hours of nocturnal bliss. There have been four main stages identified in sleep when the brain works at different speeds, or cycles. The first three stages are different depths of sleep (N1, N2, N3) while the fourth stage has been names REM (Rapid Eye Movement) due to the quick movement the eyes make at the onset of this level. It is known that dreaming takes place during REM as when subjects were woken up in experimentation during the fourth stage they would always report being mid-dream.

Studies suggest that we dream every single night we sleep (when we reach REM that is, during a short nap not necessarily) and we skip through our sleep cycles every 60-90 minutes, therefore dreaming several times per night for periods as long as 20 minutes at a time. Whether we remember the dream or not is dependent on the stage of sleep we wake up in. Like in the studies those who are awoken in REM remember their dreams, while those awoken in the different stages don’t necessarily and sometimes never at all, although it is reported that you can train yourself to remember your dreams using various different methods (I can account for this myself).

In ancient times dreams were relied upon as interaction with the Gods or the dead, a supernatural world that was some kind of split reality from our own where messages of importance would be delivered (see ‘The Bible’) as well as warnings of the future foreseen. In other times nightmares were connected with contact with the devil while pleasant dreams with Gods or angels. In history dreams were considered highly important and served as messages or instructions to use in waking life, but those feelings towards dreams did not last.

Later, especially in western culture, dreams began to lose importance and became thought of as meaningless until Sigmund Freud wrote about their importance to psychology. Freud thought that dreams represented the innermost desires of the individual and were highly important in understanding the workings of the mind. Fritz Perls had similar thoughts to Freud but believed that every aspect of a dream was a representation of oneself, if someone was having a dream about an angry monster for example, that monster would represent an aspect of their own mind, perhaps anger or fear that was being projected by the subconscious mind.

There are also modern theories that dreams actually have no meaning at all and that they are just some kind of scrambled version of memories and emotions unwinding as we sleep, the brain untangling itself after a day filled of multi-sensory absorption. The one main problem I have with these theories is that they don’t seem to offer explanation to recurring dreams and nightmares, dreams with near identical structure or themes that we don’t seem to have control over and cannot shake off. Recurring nightmares can cause considerable stress and create immense frustration. Are these dreams without meaning and simply a process of memory/emotion? I find that very hard to believe.

Fritz Perls and successive gestalt psychologists/hypnotherapists such as Randal Churchill, have had great success using dream therapy, analysing dreams as projections of subconscious issues in order to fix problems in their client’s lives. Recurring dreams would be seen as subconscious problems that have not been dealt with, perhaps repressed feelings that the conscious mind has not overcome and the subconscious mind is continually pushing to be dealt with. During dream therapy the issues would be explored and dealt with, and after such work the recurring dream/nightmare will typically cease, with the individual reporting a great sense of relief and a feeling of being able to move on in their life. Is this proof enough that dreams are not simply scrambled memories?

I have seen this for myself first hand. I had a recurring dream for a number of years surrounding a childhood friend who would inexplicably enter into my dreams on a regular basic. It wasn’t distressing but it did make me wonder why he was there, and filled me with a sense of frustration. It wasn’t until I fully explored my feelings of guilt surrounding this particular friendship and circumstances surrounding it that the friend disappeared from my sleep! It was actually quite a wonderful experience to have my personal mystery solved. I have since worked with clients myself as a hypnotherapist and have found similar results, and not just with recurring dreams. Every dream has themes that can be explored and these are always of interest and of use to the dreamer so long as they are open and willing to delve deep enough.

In conclusion it is my strong opinion that dreams are a clear view of what is going on in your deepest state of mind; a strong connection to the subconscious. These messages from your subconscious can certainly be worked with to help further understand the mind and the way that it behaves. The subconscious mind works in mysterious ways that we cannot fully explain yet, but we can see the results of dream therapy enough to conclude that key inner feelings are brought to the surface in our dreams, which can then be dealt with to improve our REAL waking lives.

In short dreams can be used to help make us happier. In that respect dreams are very important to our lives and it would be ignorant to pass them off as meaningless without exploring even a little deeper beneath the surface.

What do you think about your own dreams? Is there something you find hard to explain? Please feel free to leave a comment, or if you would prefer email me at healnowtherapy@hotmail.co.uk

On the internet there are many 'dream translation' guides, such as this one http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/ Some people find these interpretations of dreams helpful, and many dreams can have similar symbolic meaning for everyone, ie fear etc, but I think it is important to point out that dreams are immensely personal and so for instance if two people dream about a cat, the cat can represent two very different things to either person. We are all unique and have a unique representation of the world around us, so it is only you who can confirm for certain what different aspects of your dream truly mean, and not a generic description.