The myth of the eight-hour sleep

I am really into 'do what works for you'. You may find that that sleeping in two 4 hour blocks changes your life. You feel alive!<p>Alternatively you may find yourself more tired. Personally I like sleeping 8-9 hours a night. I find myself fairly alert a few minutes after I wake up and I can start my day. It certainly doesn't feel 'unnatural' to me.<p>I am also a big fan of sleeping when other people sleep so I can enjoy time with friends and family. Unusual sleep patterns typically mean missing out on some of this time.

There is only one study in this article, and it involves how a group of people adapted to a 14-hour sleep pattern. Other than that, there are no studies of importance here, nothing that confirms concretely that this kind of segmented sleep is effective for humans. It is based on historical hearsay but cannot make a prescriptive judgment. The evidence purely anecdotal. Please be careful in reading things like this that you do not immediately form a blind belief or justification.

The New York Times took on this topic a few years back in a very good article that argued that the whole idea of the 8-hour sleep was invented by the mattress industry (and other purveyors of sleep products), and that humans don't need anywhere near 8 hours of continuous sleep.<p>Ironically, all of the industry's marketing makes people anxious about getting enough sleep--and makes it harder for them to get to sleep (thus propagating the need for more expensive mattresses and pillows.)<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18sleep-t.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18sleep-t.html?pa...</a>

Oh my God. This could change my life.<p>One lifelong problem I've got is sleeping. I have great trouble falling asleep, and my sleeping patterns are very uncommon: some days I sleep 12 hours, some 5, but I'm usually very tired because of this. However, I used to think I had a "gift" of being really creative and having my best ideas just before sleep, just waking up, and during insomnia episodes. However, I've discovered that many suffer from this phenomena (anyone here?). This article could explain a lot!

My brother in law is a "sleep scientist" at UPenn.<p>His recommendation is that sleep cycles typically happen in 4 hour intervals so it's best to sleep 4 or 8 hours a night.<p>Getting up int he middle of a sleep cycle is often as bad as getting less than 4 hours of sleep.<p>And going to bed drunk is the worst for your sleep cycle.

Google ngram explorer has the term 'first sleep' peaking in use in English Language circa 1870, before declining ~80% to present day. <a href="http://bit.ly/zt8AfD" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/zt8AfD</a><p>Tough to say if this was a 19th century phenomenon or was persistent through history based on the structure of their corpus.

Isn't this the proverbial midnight? You went to sleep for about four hours, then woke to have a midnight snack.

It would have been nice if there were some actionable items. What are the best segments? Is there something wrong if I can sleep 8 hours without trouble?<p>Does anyone have links to more research, perhaps with something a little more actionable of a conclusion?

I am going to try for a week or two. Having nearly 12 hours dedicated to work, I only have 4 exhausted hours in the evenings for eating dinner, spending time with my wife, kids and myself.<p>If my wife and I split our sleep cycle into two 4 hour periods we can better spend my four hours of free time.<p>The waking period between my commute and first sleep could be spend eating dinner, playing with the kids, and exercise. After my first sleep I can spend time with my wife, and study with a rested mind. Theoretically it seems like a good idea. We'll see how I cope after a week or two of trying.

For a long time I've wanted to cut myself off and figure out a natural sleep cycle. Normally (for better or for worse), I sleep 5-6 hours a night during the week, then get 8-9 on the weekends, but that's definitely shaped to the work week.<p>Also, maybe interesting - two 4 hour sleep cycle with a couple hours between is what happens naturally to me after a night of too much drinking. I wonder if there's some reason for that.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep</a> has some interesting links

Sleep is weird. If I wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep... I feel like ass the next day. If I get less than eight hours I'm pretty tired the next day.<p>But science says that shouldn't happen!?<p>Not enough evidence to suggest that there's any kind of regularity to how humans "should" sleep yet.

Just get rid of your alarm clock, and wake up when your body tells you to.

I have never slept for 8hrs, not even close. I sometimes wonder how people can sleep for that long and what their jobs and life's must be like. After 5-7hrs I usually wake up feeling totally refreshed and ready to go (even better after my first coffee ;))

This is great, I've always worried about being or feeling awake for long periods at night. What doesn't seem clear though is whether I should be setting aside 10 hours a night for sleep (two 4 hour cycles + 2 waking hours in between)

There's a Zen saying relevant to the article (and to much of the discussion here). Rather than wringing your hands over "optimal sleep", I suggest trying it out. If your schedule allows, it can work wonders:<p><i>When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.</i>

Interesting article. I usually sleep from 7pm - 10pm, wake up and do stuff (like read HN), then sleep again from 3am - 8am, with just enough time to get ready for work in the morning.<p>Not too long ago I suffered from minor insomnia and lucid dreaming. It was awful, to the point where I started to dread bedtime. For me, my diet at the time (fatty foods + sugar + caffeine + alcohol) had a lot to do with it, so once I committed to a healthy diet, my body settled back into a consistent sleep cycle. I guess it's really what works for you.

I experience two sleeps sometimes when I'm not alone or when I drink a lot. If I'm alone, I usually read for an hour, and if I'm not alone, reading is the second choice. I always go back to sleep easily and get my full allotment. Until I read this article, it never occurred to me that I might be able to have that experience every night. Honestly, it sounds wonderful; sign me up to be in the vanguard. Now if only I could figure out how to make it happen when I'm alone and not drunk!

This would be an interesting opportunity for Zeo or Fitbit to chime in on this if they were to mine their data, anonymize it and publish something about their users sleep patterns.

According to my Bodymedia Fit, I almost never ever get a true 8 hours or more of sleep. Sure, I lay down at 10 PM or so and get up at 6 AM or later, but if this little device is as accurate as they claim it really opened my eyes that I was never getting 8 hours, when I thought I actually was. It says normally I get between 6 and 7 hours.<p>Edit: I'm curious what the recommended amount of sleep, or if it really is an individual thing per 24 hour or so period.

There is some problem with the title of the article. It could also mean that you dont need 8 hours of sleep. Other point is the need for sleep varies with age. Babies sleep for very long time like 14 hours; old people need only 5 to 6 hours of sleep. The 8 hour sleep is for youth between 25 and 40 i think. Otherwise, very original point, I have never thought sleeping in 4-hour chunks was natural.

Not that I know anything about this, but isn't it possible that having this segmented sleep could possibly be <i>bad</i> for you? Just because our ancestors slept as such doesn't mean it's necessarily good for you, does it? (That's not to say it couldn't be good, just that I don't understand why the article seems to imply that it necessarily must be good.)

Has anyone ever read <a href="http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm</a> or put it through any verification? It looks good but I'm no biologist, I've used it as my basis for years to avoid polyphasic schedules and embrace naps and biphasic sleep when my life allows for it.

I have this weird sleep pattern, where I sleep from around 5pm-7pm or 7.30pm without an alarm clock, I am sleeping very deeply, always dreaming and really hard to wake me up (I don't notice the phone ringing right next to me) and then I'm sleeping from 1am to 6am, where I usually don't remember dreaming and where I wake up very easily

Interesting. Some of the lucid dreaming techniques try to capitalize on the split sleep schedule by taking melatonin before the first segment(induces a REM-less, deep sleep for the most part) and other supplements (vitamin B6, etc) before the second segment, resulting in a longer, more vivid dreaming session.

"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."<p>'Plunging' people into 14 hours of darkness per day? Does this sound like a scientifically sound way to determine the natural sleeping patterns of humans?

My sleep is a lot more deep when I regularly sleep around 7 hours. Anything less or over makes me restless. I think I am going to try this. If I get up in middle of night, I will work for an hour or two and when I feel sleepy, I will go to bed.

I've kept a sleep pattern of 4-5 hours by accident, and I don't seem to function any less efficiently than when I sleep 8 or more hours. I do end up taking a nap on occasion, but that's still 6-7 hours, not 8.

Some recent studies showed that an healthy night seems to be no more than 7 hours.<p>Segmented sleep is interesting but I don't think a majority of people could balance that with family and work.

A great page about sleep cycles is this one <a href="http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm</a>

Really? I think this is BS... I don't care about statistics or a 1595 painting or whatever.<p>What I know is if I sleep less than seven hours I feel like crap during the day.

I seem to operate best on a 6 hour block and a 3 hour block. The problem is that doing this my body wants to have a total cycle time around 26 hours.

The guy who did this study spent 20 years. He found 500 'references to segmented sleep'. One of which being a painting depicting people not sleeping and sleeping simultaneously.<p>That's less than one reference every 2 weeks. Either that guy had the most relaxing job in the world, or it is genuinely difficult to find such references. Assuming the latter to give the researcher the benefit of the doubt here; how deep do you have to look before you start to think that maybe this isn't actually that common after all?<p>Also, how the bbc title reflects this study is beyond me.

So if one wanted to try getting into this cycle, do you set an alarm after 4 hours or if you wake up at all naturally in the night, stay up?

I'm always tired and sleepy, doesn't matter how many hours I sleep. Taking pills to sleep make me fill dizzy all day long :(

While we are on the subject of sleep, does anyone here experience sleep paralysis?

<a href="http://sleepyti.me/" rel="nofollow">http://sleepyti.me/</a>

I had 10 hours last night. 8 til 6

now corporations want you to work more than 9 hours per day.