Posts tagged: science
“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.”
I DO THIS. I sleep for about 4 hours, wake up, take Mum to work, fuck around for a bit, then sleep for another four, then I’m awake.
This is weeeeeeird.
Wow, huh! I’d read once that this used to be commonly accepted back in the… uh… I forget the years but it was pre-industrial Europe? People would have a “first sleep”, get up, visit neighbors, do whatever quietly in the night, go back to bed and have a “second sleep” until morning. It was a thing and modern sociologists could not figure out why this was so or what happened to it. I’d never heard of this follow-up study before. Cool.
that sounds perfect. i get super tired around 9 p.m. but of course i don’t go to sleep then - who does? so usually i don’t get tired again until 2 a.m. and then wake up naturally after 5-6 hours of sleep (though i’m obviously still tired since that wasn’t enough). clearly i should be sleeping in chunks.