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I’ve been having trouble sleeping for the past few nights (excluding last night, I totally won that one) and it has been driving me crazy. I know that stressing about a thing like sleep isn’t really conducive to getting it done. I don’t know about you guys but when I get mad about the fact that I can’t sleep, it just makes it worse. I flop around and beat my pillows (much to the delight of my rock-sleeper boyfriend) and generally want to scream. I can get to sleep, no problem, but staying asleep has been a huge issue. I usually wake up a few times in the night, to roll over and fix my pillow and such, but lately I’ve not been able to sink back into sleep.
This BBC article has some really interesting theories about pre-17th century sleep patterns. A psychiatrist in the 90’s performed an experiment where he had a group of people “plunged into darkness” for 14 hours every day for a month. These people settled into a pattern of sleeping, waking for a few hours, then sleeping again. Apparently (according to the article), before the advent of nighttime lighting (streetlights, etc.), peoples’ sleep patterns were a two-parter. They would go to sleep (relatively early) for about fours hours, wake up for an hour or two, and then go back to sleep for another four or so hours. This pattern diminished as society became more nocturnal as going to bars, late night coffee houses and other nighttime pursuits grew commonplace. A contributor to the article, sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs, believes that the old pattern of waking up during the night is “part of normal human physiology”. Thus, the eight hour sleep that we’ve been told is the standard, might not be right for us.
Robb Wolf, of the Paleo Solution, also has some thoughts on sleep. His rebuttal to the BBC article can be found here, and basically says that sure, if we had the chance to have 14 hours of sleep in the dark, then maybe we could go back to that “bi-modal” style of sleep. However, since not many people have the luxury of sleeping 14 hours a day (in a pitch black room, no less), the key is to maximize the time you actually get, and minimize the amount of artificial light you have near you while sleeping. Artificial light elevates cortisol levels (because hey, when it’s light out you should be doing something, right?) and so when you’re trying to sleep with the hallway light beaming at you under the door and your alarm clock blinking at your face, you probably won’t have the best sleep. In addition, watching tv and staring at the computer screen before bed won’t help your sleep much either. According to this article, indoor lighting before bed also contributes to a lower level of melatonin, which “could, in turn, have effects on sleep quality and the body’s ability to regulate body temperature, blood pressure and glucose levels.” Not so good.
How to remedy? Get some blackout curtains, don’t have an alarm clock staring you in the face (Amazon sells some cool “daylight” ones), and try and stop looking at your tv/computer/phone at least a half hour before you head to bed. I need to put this into practice myself as well (I’m guilty of playing Sudoku on my phone before I go to sleep). Here’s to having some good sleeps in the near future!
The Primal Islander 