Complex Numbers

Rounded By a Sleep

I saved this one to share because a) my sleep is biphasic and b) it's another example of "Yeah, about that..."

Sleep however you feel like  

This comes from a biologist whose blog I follow, but here he's quoting another external source.

A while back, there was an idea that swept through social media that there is this thing called biphasic sleep.

I had no idea it was on "social media," because other than Untappd (social media for drunks), I don't follow any of it. Still, I saw some articles about it, though I don't think I linked them here. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, here's a Wikipedia link.  

The particular kind Myers is talking about here, though, is when one goes to bed after sunset, sleeps for a few hours, wakes up, takes care of some writing or whatever, then goes back to sleep. Some recent articles have been touting that as an ideal from pre-industrial societies.

Hold it right there, not so fast: it’s probably not true. There isn’t one way you’re supposed to sleep.

And of course someone has to throw a wrench into it.

There is no evidence that sleep was universally segmented, and there is also little evidence that segmented sleep is better. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies on biphasic sleep schedules found that segmented-sleeping subjects actually reported “lower sleep quality … and spent more time in lighter stages of sleep.” One reasonable takeaway is that biphasic sleep is like anarchical foraging: Both might have well served some ancient populations some of the time, but neither of them offers a clear solution to modern problems.

Back to Myers:

I find that even more reassuring. Don’t hold people to the one true way they’re supposed to do something, everyone is different, different cultures lead to different behaviors, and there’s nothing wrong with being a bi or a mono-sleeper. Individuals can even change! The only norm is that we have diverse patterns of activity.

And that's a conclusion I can get behind. We're not all alike. I'm not a morning person; I never have been a morning person, and I still resent the conditions that pretty much forced me into being a morning person for my entire working life. I thrive by following a sleep pattern that involves me waking up after the accursed daystar is already well clear of the horizon.

Someone else might prefer to wake up when I'm going to sleep, and they've already passed out just when I'm starting to get energized (which is right around now). And that's okay too.

The problem comes in when the assumption is made that there is only One Approved Sleep Cycle, and everyone is forced into it, like it or not.

I've seen evolutionary psychology hypotheses for why we don't all have just one sleep cycle, but I'm lukewarm at best on evo-psych; a lot of it reads like Kipling's "Just-So" stories. But this one actually makes sense: that before agriculture, before industry, it was beneficial for survival to have some tribal members sleeping at different hours, to be able to stand watch for predators. Obviously I don't know if it's true or not, or whether it's correlation or causation, but it does make a kind of sense. We're not all the same, and we shouldn't all be made to follow the same patterns.

The article I linked above also touches on cultural differences -- not differences in sleep patterns among members of a particular culture, but how different cultures approach sleep. Which is interesting.

But I do have to take issue with Myers' conclusion:

Although “like a baby” is a pretty good ideal.

Really? It's been a long time since I've been a baby (and I don't remember much of it), and I've strenuously avoided having any of my own, but everything I've seen makes "sleep like a baby" sound like anything but an ideal. They wake up in the middle of the night demanding food and/or diaper changes. Once you do get one of them to sleep, every adult within a ten-mile radius is forced to shh, be quiet, shh, the baby's sleeping, because it'll wake up at anything louder than a pin drop.

Still, I think the general advice is sound: use the sleep cycle that works for you, to the extent possible given other responsibilities. If that's one solid nine-hour sleep, great. If you only need six, fine. If you'd rather make it three hours in the afternoon and six at night, go for it. I just think that healthy sleep is sleeping when your own rhythms urge it.

So, no, I don't want to sleep like a baby. I just want to sleep the way my body tells me I ought to be sleeping.