Shine OnWaking up throughout the night is natural: Experts
We've all done it. Unable to get back to sleep after being woken up in the middle of the night by a partner's snoring or anxiety over a big presentation the next day, we watch the minutes tick by, getting more and more stressed as those remaining few hours of rest slip away.
But it turns out that waking up in the dark isn't as bad as you may think. A growing body of evidence suggests that "bi-modal" or two-phase sleep is a more natural way for humans to function, reports the Globe and Mail.
That's comforting news for people like parents and shift workers, who simply cannot make time for the eight-hours of uninterrupted sleep that experts recommend and that few Canadians get.
The newspaper reports that anthropologists, historians and psychiatrists have all argued that the idea of sleeping straight through the night is a relatively recent phenomenon. Such researchers say that people split their sleep into two chunks for much of history.
[See also: Nine bad habits that are good for you]
Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech has found more than 500 references to segmented sleeping patterns in diaries, court records, medical books and literature from around the world, including a reference from Homer's Odyssey, reports BBC News.
Before the invention of electric lights, people headed to bed soon after sunset and slept for a few hours. They'd wake in the middle of the night to read, pray, write, or speak or have sex with their partner before falling back asleep until morning.
However, with the onset of street lighting, domestic lighting and all-night coffee houses, people began to spend less time in bedg. By the 1920s, the idea of a bi-modal sleeping had faded entirely.
"Many people wake up at night and panic," Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, told BBC News.
"I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."
For everything you need to know about sleep, check out the video below.
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