It happens us too often. We are having a broken night’s sleep so we worry ourselves into a tizzy, boring our eyes into the ceiling, willing for sleep to come.
The red digits on the alarm clock click to 4:00 am. That’s it, the panic sets in, we’re going to be bleary-eyed messes in work tomorrow, “Everyone will think I had a few glasses of wine too many the night before when really I headed straight up to bed after Downton…”
On top of this incessant worrying we have research bombarding us from every which way explaining to us how sleep can damage our health, cause premature death, double our chances of heart-attacks… relax.
What if a night of broken sleep is actually natural for some people? What if sleeping less than the required seven or eight hours sleep actually suits some people’s body clocks?
These are the controversial suggestions that two newly-published books have put out there to challenge our “rules” as to what is a proper night’s sleep.
The authors argue that the ‘eight hours uninterrupted’ rule is a myth that was created to suit factory owners in the Industrial Revolution. Controversial.
They say that our natural state is to have segmented periods of sleep, this could coincide with a recent report on sleep cycles.
The curse of the ‘sleeping rules’ we have is that many people who cannot get eight hours sleep a night or who regularly experience a broken night’s sleep end up suffering from anxiety as a result. David Randall argues this in his book, In Dreamland: Adventures In The Strange Science Of Sleep.
The Daily Mail reports Randall as saying; “We know we should be getting a good night’s rest, but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night.
“Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids.”
Possibly the most-dreaded sight ever.
Wolf-Meyer, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz asks if a society cannot rest, how can we sleep?
He argues that our society must learn “to recognise the variety and limits of sleep, to have flexible expectations about it and to combat the damage that industrial control has had on our natural rhythms”.
If you’re a person who naturally awakes during the night, no fear. Getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is not a disaster. Just relax in the bed, rest and sleep will come again. Broken sleep is entirely natural for some.
If you feel tired during the day, do not be afraid to nap. If you have a re-energising sleep for a maximum of 30 minutes, it will not interrupt your cycle tonight, it will only re-energise your body and get you set for the second half of your day.
Google employees in the US are encouraged to sleep for 30 minutes in the middle of the day as they believe it increases productivity in their workforce.
Maybe we could mention that here…!
If you are finding it difficult to catch some z’s full-stop and find it is affecting your daily life, try some of our natural sleep tips here.
