For 150 Years, We’ve Been Told to Get 8 Hours of Sleep. This Review Says It Was Never the Norm
Researchers say regularity and circadian alignment matter more than hitting one magic number.
For years, eight hours of sleep has been treated as the norm. Whole industries have been created with the goal of helping people hit that number. A new review questions where the concept originated.
The narrative review, which was published in the peer-reviewed Brain Medicine on Tuesday, points to industrialization as the likely culprit. The research took an anthropological, historical, and phylogenomical view on the history of sleep, arguing that timing and regularity separate modern sleep from ancient ancestral patterns.
The magic number’s origin
The review said that during the middle of the 19th century, a numerical pattern started to dominate society: eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of sleep. However, it was never studied systematically. The review then asks the question: How did this convention become a clinical benchmark?
Seithikurippu R. Pandi-Perumal, M.Sc, first author of the review and the president and CEO of Somnogen Canada, a research-focused pharmaceutical company, said that much of the current literature regarding sleep time focuses on whether modern-day sleepers are getting fewer hours than our ancestors.
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“We think that is the wrong question,” Pandi-Perumal said in the release. “Put the field data next to the archival record and next to the genomics, and what separates industrial sleep from pre-industrial sleep is when it happens and how reliably it repeats. Not how many hours it fills.”
The modern-day hunter-gatherer societies
In studying the three chosen populations—Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Boliof light and dark closely. The review reported no consistent evidence of segmented or biphasic patterns in these groups
One of the studies examined in the review was published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology. It found that the average nightly sleep of these modern day hunter-gatherer societies ranged from roughly 6.4 to 7.1 hours, a number similar to, and in some cases even shorter than, many industrialized schedules.
Source: www.inc.com
