Naps and Two Sleep

I turned 59 years old a few days ago. That was celebrated by going to a seafood restaurant in Matosinhos, a coastal neighbour town to Porto, where I live. We ate well and I topped the meal off with a cup of coffee. It was late by the time we got home, so we all went to bed pretty much immediately. But four hours later, I was wide awake. My normal pattern of sleeping soundly through the night was broken. However, instead of fretting about this, I got up and spent the next hour and a half drinking tea and playing Spider solitaire on my PC. Then I got back into bed for another few hours of sleep.

This is the sort of things I can do due to my status as a retiree. I don't have to be up at a specific hour, and even if I were, I can always sneak in a nap during the day to make up for any lack of sleep during the night. But there's another reason for my relaxed attitude to this kind of occurrences, and that is the fact that waking up in the middle of night for an hour or two used to be the norm. There's nothing unhealthy or strange about it, and anyone bothered by it should simply give in to the pattern and do what I did the other night: Get up, do something, and then go back to bed once sleepiness returns.

The current norm, defined by about 8 hours of continuous sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of leisurely breaks of various kinds, is in fact a relatively new invention. The norm used to be a pattern more in tune with our biology. There's a natural dip after lunch, and there's a period of light sleep in the middle of the night. In the olden days, people would take naps after lunch and they would be up for an hour or two in the middle of the night.

This pattern made sense because houses used to have things that needed tending to every now and again. A fire place would need some maintenance every four hours. If we slept through the night for eight hours straight, the fire would be out, and that was a real problem before matches were invented. A household with animals would require regular inspections. Making sure everything is in order was an important part of daily life, and eight hours of sleep without a break doesn't fit that requirement.

A nap after lunch makes sense as well. The drowsiness we feel after a big meal is not something we should ignore. It's a signal, and it's a bit of a mystery that there hasn't been more research into the health benefits of such a nap. The reason no-one seems interested in researching it may be that naps are counter to the politically desired norm. A study that comes out in favour of naps will in other words be inconvenient for the elite who would prefer for the lumpen to remain in their current pattern.

The Social Contract