I wondered if second sleep was covered? Basically, in historical documents it's taken as common knowledge that everyone woke up in the middle of the night for a couple of hours. Studies have now confirmed that when people are subjected to natural light cycles - no bright electric lights on when it goes dark, that they also fell into a pattern of sleeping for a few hours, waking up in the middle of the night, then sleeping a few more hours.
Some of the stories surrounding it are quite interesting.
I also wondered if studies have proven synced sleep cycles - like a mother and her nursing baby or husband and wife? Because I've certainly experienced that.
In my house, I'm the morning person - in fact, the person who needs less sleep. Typically I do quite well on 6 hours of sleep. I wake up myself at 6:00 am and find it impossible to sleep past 8. Which means that on Saturday mornings with no school/work/church I'm alone and can write.
So a world which accommodated my night owl husband and children (school mornings with a night owl eight year old (or 5, 6, 7 year old) are torture) would make me so very, very happy.
What about you guys?
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
I'm trying to remember where I read this. But I came across a study that took people out of cities and made them live in locations without anything other than natural lighting for several weeks. Their sleeping patterns shifted back several hours to match up with when daylight was available.
The study suggested that artificial lights including computers, TVs, street lights, building lights, etc all have the same effect on our circadian rhythms as sunlight to some extent. So our bodies are still trying to deal with being stimulated by light constantly.