My insomonia explained

April 3, 2008

I’ve had sleeping trouble on and off for several years, and in order to combat it I’ve tried to regain some sort of natural rhythm in sleeping. That means going to bed earlier than most and not relying on an alarm clock to wake me up. (Note that this latter is only possible because I live so close to work and get to let the morning light wake me up.)

That’s been working pretty well, except I frequently have a period of wakefulness around two or three in the morning. According to Stanley Coren’s book Sleep Thieves this seems to be a rather natural occurrence, but now there’s even better indication of how natural it is.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, “may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,” Ekirch told me. “It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.” [ The Sleep-Industrial Complex ]

In other words, what I’ve been parsing as “insomnia” — even though it is often the most productive writing time for me — may actually be a result of trying to regain a natural sleep rhythm. There’s nothing wrong with me at all, it’s more or less what we’re supposed to do. And did, at least until our culture decided to value chronic sleep-deprivation as a hallmark of personal industry.

Thanks to Philip Carr-Gomm for reading the NYT so I don’t have to.

Posted in Science