Consolidated vs unconsolidated sleep😴

🪶 If you have ever awakened feeling unrested after a full night's sleep, this paper is for you.

Hi,

Have you ever woken up and been unable to sleep in the middle of the night? How would your perspective on that experience change if you thought of it as natural?

What is a Natural Sleep Pattern?

Today I'd like to share with you an older study about human sleep.

This paper busted apart one of my core assumptions about sleep: that humans need 8 solid hours of it per night.

The Connection between Light and Sleep

It turns out, that "need" may actually be the result of our 16-hour artificial lighting schedules. Under more natural lighting conditions, humans never sleep more than a few hours at a time. Instead, their sleep is biphasic or polyphasic like the rest of the animal kingdom.

So one of the things I have noticed as I have tuned my environment while living in a temperate climate is sleep occurs in chunks across the night (and sometimes day, especially in the summer when I tend to take more daytime naps).

Read the full text of the study here: In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic (1992).

That's all for today, but you can always find more the archive. I will send more research about sleep styles in my upcoming emails.

Do you have any questions about natural sleep patterns? Let me know!