And another early night

Again, only 7:00PM but feels more like 9:00PM - been sleeping segmented recently, waking up around 2:00AM for an hour or so and drifting back into a light sleep. This is the way we used to sleep before the industrial revolution made us slaves of the clock.

Here are two articles on this - first, from the Beeb:

The myth of the eight-hour sleep
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

And then this one from ScienceAlert:

Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Do It Again
Around a third of the population have trouble sleeping, including difficulties maintaining sleep throughout the night.

While nighttime awakenings are distressing for most sufferers, there is some evidence from our recent past that suggests this period of wakefulness occurring between two separate sleep periods was the norm.

Throughout history, there have been numerous accounts of segmented sleep, from medical texts, to court records and diaries, and even in African and South American tribes, with a common reference to "first" and "second" sleep.

In Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge (1840), he writes:

"He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream."

Interesting - I feel great, very healthy. Just started sleeping like this for some reason.

Anyway, time for YouTube and then to bed.