The eight hour dream myth

Since childhood, we were told to sleep eight hours. As institutes, doctors and parents repeated the same thing. There were simply no alternative opinions: eight hours - and a full stop. However, recent medical and historical studies provide more and more evidence that eight hours of sleep is unnatural for humans.



For example, the experiment of the psychiatrist Thomas Vera (Thomas Wehr) in the 90s showed that if you put a person in an isolated environment, then over time the sleep pattern breaks into two segments of four hours each.



In 2001, historian Robert Ekirch (Roger Ekirch) published the result of his 16-year work on the study of historical sources. He collected more than 500 testimonies, which also point to the segmentation of sleep in residents of various tribes and nations, ranging from the ancient African nations, ending with ancient Greece and medieval instructions on the daily routine for the monks. As in previous experience, the historian came to the conclusion that there are two periods of sleep: the first begins several hours after sunset, and the second follows several hours after the first. According to Ekirch, the period of nighttime wakefulness is a natural human behavior at all times, and only from the end of the 17th century did such activity disappear as urbanization and industrialization of society grew, and by the end of the 19th century the evidence of wakefulness at night almost completely disappeared from literary sources.



According to the researcher, the habit of double sleep began to revive in the 1920s with the advent of entertainment nightlife in the cities. And although many people have already managed to adapt to the eight-hour sleep, it still remains unnatural for the human body.