The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox: How We Are Sleeping Our Way to Fatigue, Disease and Unhappiness

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Monitor yourself or your child for mouth breathing and/or an open mouth resting posture. How often does it occur during the day? Next, find the section that asks for the date. Write the current date or the specific date of the sleep record that you are reporting. Yetish says that studying sleep in small-scale societies has “completely” changed his own perspective.

Now, I'm going through the process of trying out different CPAP machines and masks, as well as mandibular advancement devices. Despite the doctors warning that I could die from low O2 levels, I'm having a terrible time adjusting to CPAP. Hopefully, I'll be able to correct my issues with a dental device. If not, I'll have no choice but to use CPAP.On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city dweller who stayed up doomscrolling on their smartphone. Deep stage sleep is different from all the other stages of sleep and is key to reversing the aging process and preventing disease. In a zoo or lab, animals might sleep less than is natural, because of stress. Or they might sleep more, Capellini says, “just because animals are that bored.” And the standard laboratory conditions — 12 hours of light, 12 hours of dark — might not match what an animal experiences in nature throughout the year. Finally, review the form thoroughly for any other questions or sections that need to be completed. Fill them out as required or leave them blank if not applicable.

What this means for you:while you’re sleeping, theunconscious brain immediately noticeslow oxygen levels and has to bounce the body out of deep sleep by tensing upthe muscles enough to reopen the airway so that you don’t suffocate. On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. This book will teach you how to achieve your highest quality sleep to become your best, brightest, most capable self. A lot of people in the global North and the West like to problematize their sleep,” he says. But maybe insomnia, for example, is really hypervigilance — an evolutionary superpower. “Likely that was really adaptive when our ancestors were sleeping in the savannah.” Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than seven hours a night, says evolutionary anthropologist David Samson at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep around 9.5 hours out of every 24. Cotton-top tamarins sleep around 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though really, they’re hardly ever awake — they sleep for 17 hours a day.Humans, then, seem to have evolved to need less sleep than our primate relatives. Samson showed in a 2018 analysis that we did this by lopping off non-REM time. REM is the sleep phase most associated with vivid dreaming. That means, assuming other primates dream similarly, we may spend a larger proportion of our night dreaming than they do. We’re also flexible about when we get those hours of shut-eye. If you have a herniated disc, pinched spinal nerve, or a degeneration of the disc, you may not be able to sleep on the floor. It is not entirely clear what scientific evidence supports this claim, but it is critical to consider the pros and cons of sleeping on the ground before making an informed decision. How Do You Choose The Best Sleeping Position And Why Does It Matter?

How much we sleep is a different question, of course, from how much we wish we slept. Samson and others asked Hadza study participants how they felt about their own sleep. Out of 37 people, 35 said they slept “just enough,” the team reported in 2017. The average amount participants slept in that study was about 6.25 hours a night. But they awoke frequently, needing more than nine hours in bed to get those 6.25 hours of shut-eye.Samson also thinks these sleep shells would have facilitated our ancient ancestors’ journey out of Africa and into colder climates. In this way, he sees sleep as a crucial subplot in the story of human evolution. As special as we seem? If scientists had a clearer picture of primate sleep in the wild, human sleep might turn out to not be as exceptionally short as it seems. “Every time there is a claim that humans are special about something, once we start having more data, we realize they’re not that special,” Capellini says. We should think of early human camps and bands as like a snail’s shell,” he says. Groups of humans may have shared simple shelters. A fire might have kept people warm and bugs away. Some group members could sleep while others kept watch.