University Distinguished Professor of History at Virginia TechĮkirch subsequently found multiple references to a “first” and “second” sleep in diaries, medical texts, works of literature and prayer books. Roger Ekirch when he came across the first reference to segmented sleep in a London archive office. He’s convinced “a large number of people who today suffer from middle-of-the-night insomnia, the primary sleep disorder in the United States – and I dare say in most industrialized countries – rather than experiencing a quote unquote, disorder, are in fact, experiencing a very powerful remnant, or echo of this earlier pattern of sleep,” said Ekirch, who stressed he was speaking from a historical perspective and not as a medical doctor.Īdults need more than seven hours of sleep a night, but more than a third of American adults are not getting enough sleep on a regular basis, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is value in knowing about this prior pattern of sleep in the Western world, said Ekirch. It also offers new ways to cope with and think about sleep problems. The history of sleep not only reveals fascinating details about everyday life in the past, but the work of Ekirch, and other historians and anthropologists, is helping sleep scientists gain fresh perspective on what constitutes a good night’s sleep. It only evolved thanks to the spread of electric lighting and the Industrial Revolution, with its capitalist belief that sleep was a waste of time that could be better spent working. The practice of sleeping through the whole night didn’t really take hold until just a few hundred years ago, his work suggested. Sleep training for adults prevents depression, study finds
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