CHAPTER 4
Super sleep
If you ask most people how much sleep we should get, the common answer will be eight hours. This is a generally established paradigm accepted by most people, but the ‘eight hours a night’ was established relatively recently in our society, mostly in response to the industrial revolution and workers’ needs for regulation.
In other cultures, sleep patterns vary. The traditional Mediterranean sleep profile is five hours a night with an hour’s nap in the middle of the day. The Masai tribe in Africa only sleep three to four hours a night. Many ancient societies had two sleeping ‘shifts’ during the night, separated by several hours of wakefulness.
A study recently suggested that insomnia may be a result of the sufferers’ ...
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