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Could the way of our ancestors sleep help us sleep today?

2022-01-10T00:03:04.771Z


There are references from the pre-industrial world that reveal a way of sleeping that is no longer carried out. Could this help you fall asleep?


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(CNN) -

Like many people, historian A. Roger Ekirch thought that sleep was a biological constant, that the eight hours of night's rest never varied across time and place.

But while researching nightlife in pre-industrial Europe and America, he discovered the first evidence that many humans used to sleep in segments: a first dream and a second dream with a pause of a few hours in between to have sex, pray, eat, chat and take medicine.

"Here was a sleep pattern unknown to the modern world," said Ekirch, a distinguished college professor in Virginia Tech's history department.

Ekirch's subsequent book,

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

, unearthed more than 500 references to what has since been called 'biphasic sleep'.

Today, Ekirch has found more than 2,000 references in a dozen languages ​​and going back in time to ancient Greece.

His 2004 book will be reissued in April.

His work suggests that the practice of sleeping through the night was not enforced until a few hundred years ago.

It only evolved thanks to the diffusion of electric light and the Industrial Revolution, with its capitalist belief that sleep was a waste of time that could be better used by working.

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Not only does the sleep story reveal fascinating details about everyday life in the past, but the work of Ekirch, and other historians and anthropologists, is helping sleep scientists gain a new perspective on what constitutes a good night. of sleep.

It also offers new ways of coping with and thinking about sleep problems.

It is very valuable to know this earlier sleep pattern in the western world.

"A large number of people today suffer from insomnia in the middle of the night, the main sleep disorder in the United States - and I dare say that in most industrialized countries - instead of experiencing a disorder, in quotation marks, they are, in fact, experiencing a very powerful carryover, or echo, of this previous sleep pattern, "Ekirch said.

A panel from a medieval stained glass window depicting a sleeping couple.

The myth of 8 hours of sleep?

The first reference to the biphasic dream that Ekirch found was in a 1697 legal document from a traveling court "Assizes" buried in a London records office.

The statement from a 9-year-old girl named Jane Rowth mentioned that her mother woke up after her "first dream" to go out.

The mother was later found dead.

"I had never heard the expression, and it was phrased in such a way that it seemed perfectly normal," he said.

"Then I started to find later references in these court statements, but also in other sources."

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Subsequently, Ekirch found multiple references to a "first" and "second" dream in diaries, medical texts, literary works, and prayer books.

A 16th-century French medical manual advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day, but "after the first dream," when they "enjoy the most" and "do it better."

However, by the early 1800s, the first dream had begun to expand at the expense of the second, according to Ekirch, and the waking period in between.

At the turn of the century, the second dream was little more than rolling over in bed to get 10 more minutes of sleep.

Ben Reiss, author of

Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World

 and professor and chair of the English department at Emory University in Atlanta, blames the Industrial Revolution and the "sleep is for the weak" attitude. begot.

"The answer is really to follow the money. The changes in the economic organization, when it became more efficient to routinize work and have large numbers of people show up at factories at the same time and do as much work as possible. as concentrated as possible, "Reiss said.

Our sleep schedule was shortened and unified as a result, Reiss noted.

The image shows a lamplighter on a ladder.

British streets were lit by oil lamps until gas lighting was introduced around 1807.

No golden age

However, pre-industrial life was not a golden age in which our ancestors dedicated themselves to rest and rejuvenate, without suffering insomnia or other sleep problems, effortlessly and in tune with the cycle of day and night, weather patterns and the seasons, according to Sasha Handley, a history professor at the University of Manchester (UK).

She studies how families optimized their sleep in Great Britain, Ireland, and the American colonies of England between 1500 and 1750.

"All the debates about the history of sleep seem to focus on the turning point of industrialization, the arrival of electricity that ruined everyone's dream. The corollary of that is that everything pre-industrial was imagined as this golden age of sleep." .

A miniature of a 15th century room is shown.

Handley said her research suggested that, like today, sleep was linked to physical and mental health and was an issue that preoccupied and haunted people.

Physicians' manuals at the time are full of advice on how many hours to sleep and in what type of posture, he said.

The reference guides also list hundreds of recipes for a good night's sleep, he said.

Among them are the strangest, like cutting a pigeon in half and gluing each half to each side of the head;

and the most familiar ones, like bathing in chamomile-infused water and using lavender.

People also burned specific types of wood in their rooms, which were believed to help them fall asleep.

"In our time, sleep is closely linked to digestion, emotion, the stomach and, therefore, to the diet of people," explains Handley.

Doctors advised sleepers to rest on the right side of their body first before turning to the left side for the second half of the night.

It was thought that resting on the right, perhaps during the first sleep, allowed food to reach the pit of the stomach, where it was digested.

Turning to the left, the cooler side, released the vapors and distributed the heat evenly throughout the body.

It is believed that this habit could be the origin of the phrase of getting out of bed from the wrong side.

This is a woodcut of a dreaming fisherman, circa 1700, in Japan.

The artist is unknown.

Not all scholars believe that sleeping in two shifts, although perhaps common in some communities, was a universal custom. Not at all, says Brigitte Steger, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, who has found no reference to segmented sleep in her work on sleep habits in Japan.

"There is no natural dream. The dream has always been cultural, social and ideological," says Steger, who is working on a series of six books on the cultural history of sleep.

"There is not such a clear difference between pre-modern (or pre-industrial) sleep habits and modern ones," he said by email.

"And sleep habits throughout pre-industrial times and around the world have always changed. And, of course, there has always been social diversity, and sleep habits have been very different at court than for peasants, for example".

Similarly, Gerrit Verhoeven, associate professor of cultural heritage and history at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, said that his study of Antwerp criminal court records from the 18th century suggested that sleep habits were not that different from ours today.

The norm was to sleep seven hours and the first or second dream was not mentioned.

"As a historian, I am concerned that arguments about alleged sleep patterns in the past - prolonged, biphasic, and daytime naps - are sometimes presented as a possible remedy for our modern sleep disorders. Before drawing such conclusions, we have to do much more research on these early modern sleep patterns, "he explained.

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Rethink insomnia

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said Ekirch's discoveries about biphasic sleep, while not without controversy, had contributed to his work as a sleep scientist.

Experiments in sleep laboratories showed that when humans have the opportunity to sleep longer, their sleep can become biphasic or even polyphasic, replicating what Ekirch found in historical records.

However, Foster, who is also director of the Sir Jules Thorn Institute for Circadian Neuroscience and Sleep in Oxford, doubted that it was a worldwide sleep pattern.

No one should impose on a segmented sleep regimen, especially if it reduces overall sleep time, he added.

What is clear, according to Foster, is that interrupted sleep was perceived as a minor problem in the past and that modern expectations about what constitutes a good night's sleep - sleeping through the night for eight hours - weren't always helpful.

He said a key point was that waking up at night did not have to mean the end of the dream.

One example he cited was the increasing number of people waking up at night during lockdowns from the covid-19 pandemic.

"They get terribly anxious and worried about waking up in the middle of the night, because that's not what they normally experience," said Foster, who is also the author of

Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health

, to be published in May 2022. Most likely, people's sleep episode, that is, the time they have available to sleep, has been extended and is not limited by the sound of the alarm clock.

"It's a throwback to a time when we really slept more," he said.

If we wake up at night, we are likely to go back to sleep, if sleep is not sacrificed to social media or other behaviors that make us more alert or trigger a stress response, Foster's research suggested.

Like most sleep experts, he recommended getting out of bed if you get frustrated with not being able to get back to sleep and engage in a relaxing activity while keeping the lights low.

"The individual dream of human beings is highly variable. There is no one-size-fits-all. You don't have to worry about the type of sleep you get," he said.

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-01-10

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