The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox: How We Are Sleeping Our Way to Fatigue, Disease and Unhappiness

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This is why the eight hour trap is so pernicious. We thinkwe sleep “enough” and we accept being tired as a normal part of the aging process. The natural position for healthy breathing is always with a closed mouth, inhaling and exhaling through the nose. We’re not objective about our own sleep.Even if you feel like you sleep great, you can’t judge the quality of your own sleep because you’re unconscious while you’re sleeping. People with sleep apnea stop breathing several times per houreach night and wake up with zero recollection of everything they went through during the night. The amnesiac effect of sleep prevents usfrom knowinganything at all about what is going on in our bodies while we sleep. Not even your sleeping partner can answer this question — because they’re asleep too. Jen’s Story After taking these and other steps, if the reader concludes he needs to participate in a sleep study, the book recommends the specific study to undertake.

Deep stage sleep is different from all the other stages of sleep and is key to reversing the aging process and preventing disease. And there’s reason to suspect we haven’t. In a 2008 study, Rattenborg and colleagues attached EEG devices to three wild sloths and found that the animals slept about 9.5 hours per day. An earlier study of captive sloths, on the other hand, had recorded nearly 16 daily hours of sleep. Consider talking to a doctor or dentist who specializes in breathing and sleep. It may be time to have a sleep study done for you or your child. There are two types—at home, and in-clinic. Your doctor can help you determine the best option for you, and how to get started. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than seven hours a night, says evolutionary anthropologist David Samson at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep around 9.5 hours out of every 24. Cotton-top tamarins sleep around 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though really, they’re hardly ever awake — they sleep for 17 hours a day.

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If you have a herniated disc, pinched spinal nerve, or a degeneration of the disc, you may not be able to sleep on the floor. It is not entirely clear what scientific evidence supports this claim, but it is critical to consider the pros and cons of sleeping on the ground before making an informed decision. How Do You Choose The Best Sleeping Position And Why Does It Matter? He notes that the Tsimane sometimes have walls on their houses, for example, which would provide some safety without a human lookout. And Yetish has had people in the groups he studies tell him in the morning exactly which animals they heard during the night. Sounds wake most people at night, offering another possible layer of protection. This book will teach you how to achieve your highest quality sleep to become your best, brightest, most capable self. Gandhi Yetish, a human evolutionary ecologist and anthropologist at UCLA, has also spent time with the Hadza, as well as the Tsimane in Bolivia and the San in Namibia. In a 2015 paper, he and other researchers assessed sleep across all three groups and found that it averaged between only 5.7 and 7.1 hours. And so Yetish suggests that ancient humans may have traded some hours of sleep for sharing information and culture around a dwindling fire. “You’ve suddenly made these darkness hours quite productive,” he says. Our ancestors may have compressed their sleep into a shorter period because they had more important things to do in the evenings than rest.

the] restoration that the brain and body go through during sleep is so powerful that brushing off sleep is akin to saying, ‘Yep, I’m okay with a little brain damage every day for the rest of my life.’ Chances are, if you’ve done any reading on the importance of sleep, you know about the proverbial eight hours. For some people, an open mouth is simply a habit — their mouth rests in an open position when they’re not focused on keeping it closed. For other people, the mouth is open and used for breathing. We call this either “open mouth resting posture” or simply “open mouth.” A lot of people in the global North and the West like to problematize their sleep,” he says. But maybe insomnia, for example, is really hypervigilance—an evolutionary superpower. “Likely that was really adaptive when our ancestors were sleeping in the savanna.” By contrast, a 2016 study of almost 500 people in Chicago found they spent nearly all of their time in bed actually asleep, and got at least as much total sleep as the Hadza. Yet almost 87 percent of respondents in a 2020 survey of US adults said that on at least one day per week, they didn’t feel rested.Humans, then, seem to have evolved to need less sleep than our primate relatives. Samson showed in a 2018 analysis that we did this by lopping off non-REM time. REM is the sleep phase most associated with vivid dreaming. That means we may spend a larger proportion of our night dreaming than primates do. We’re also flexible about when we get those hours of shut-eye. Remember to carefully read and follow the instructions provided on the form itself for any specific requirements. If scientists had a clearer picture of primate sleep in the wild, human sleep might turn out to not be as exceptionally short as it seems. “Every time there is a claim that humans are special about something, once we start having more data, we realize they’re not that special,” Capellini says. A better understanding of how human sleep evolved could help people rest better, Samson says, or help them feel better about the rest they already get. The scary truth is that millions of people suffer from some degree of sleep apnea, yet aren’t aware of it.

To tie together the story of how human sleep evolved, Samson laid out what he calls his social sleep hypothesis in the 2021 Annual Review of Anthropology. He thinks the evolution of human sleep is a story about safety — specifically, safety in numbers. Brief, flexibly timed REM-dense sleep likely evolved because of the threat of predation when humans began sleeping on the ground, Samson says. And he thinks another key to sleeping safely on land was snoozing in a group. Look for a section titled "Sleep Duration" or something similar. This is where you will record the number of hours you slept. Since it is an 8-hour sleep form, write the number "8" in this section. Humans may have unusual sleep patterns for a primate, but we’re far from the weirdest sleepers in the animal kingdom. Monitor yourself or your child for mouth breathing and/or an open mouth resting posture. How often does it occur during the day? It was like putting glasses on someone who had fuzzy vision their whole life, but never knew anything different.

Flying, upside-down, covered in slime: How other animals sleep

In a 24-hour period, people spend the least time sleeping of any primate that’s been studied. However, research on captive primates may not give an accurate picture of their sleep habits in the wild. From canopy bed to snail’s shell