Your Ancestors Didn’t Sleep Like You

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: NarcolepticBuddha
I already knew that sleeping 12 hours a day is what nature intended for us

I figured you for at least 16.

No, I'm a little older than that.

My record is for 22 hours and totally dry bed

I've had sleep patterns like that in the past. My workplace was so noisy and mentally exhausting, that combined with the heavy traffic fumes on the road next to the bus stop, that by the time I got home, I would crash out from 7pm to 11pm, wake up for a few hours, then crash out again from 2am to 7am. Having our desks reshuffled and avoiding the main road helped me avoid this.

I sleep 4 to 6 hours per day. And totally pissed off all the time.

a reply to: DISRAELI

And an intelligent man he was. Thank you for that brilliant reply!

a reply to: Pandaram

Yeah, join the # club.

People that sleep can´t create money for the big money, as a working slave.
We westerners become programmed to sleep "industry-conform".

It begins with the kindergarten, when does kindergarten start?
At least here in Germany, when all the jobs in the morning start, between seven and eight. Not an hour before, so one could think it is thought to make it easier for the parents. Who will bring your kid to the kindergarten if you have to be at work, at the time the kindergarten opens?
So what these times are good for?

Then you get years of school where your sleeping behaviour is turned from natural to working slave conform, school starts between... Bueller...Bueller...seven and eight in the morning. And they don´t change that, even knowing that it is almost senseless to try to teach kids something before ten in the morning, because they are not ready to learn something and don´t get enough sleep before this time, a mother nature thing.

Making teens start school in the morning is 'cruel', brain doctor claims
sorry for the link, it`s MailOnline

Teenagers to start school at 10am in Oxford University sleep experiment
Thousands of GCSE students will start lessons an hour later to see if it improves their exam results
link[/ url]

[url=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/08/06/teen-sleep-school-start/31212457/]Study: Most teens start school too early in morning to get enough sleep

It´s all about turning you from a natural human into an industry-conform working bee, a robot.

!2hrs of sleep....pfffft...who should make the money for the greedy rich ones?
There are enough robots out there, doesn´t matter if we use them by a way that shortens their lifetime because of forced unhealthy behaviour...

Btw, here in Germany the people drink more coffee than water, or beer, or whatever else.
Guess why?
To be a good working bee(that dies of a heart attack with 45. Good for the big money, doesn`t have to pay for retirement anymore xD)!

And what for?
Nowadays you can work and work and work, on even three jobs, and are just lucky if you can pay your rent, power, food. To fund politicians that never ever really worked in their life, for a bureaucracy full of officials that don´t pay anything for social things, don´t pay into the retirement fund and cost only money, only to make the peoples lifes unnecessarily harder with this bureaucracy.
And to make those, that don´t need anything more, richer and richer!

Hurra!

a reply to: stormcell

What's abnormal, is classified now as normal.

There's something wrong with the world.

originally posted by: stormcell

Yeah. Me too.

I practice double nap for last 3 years and will not return to "normal" sleeping pattern. Only drawback is time incompatibility in social life ...

a reply to: ADSE255

That kind of sleeping is the best..feels the best and i do it since i shut off the TV's and computers for the last 4 months.

Go camping..this is what happens!

a reply to: ParasuvO

Yes. I favor camping, greatly.

a reply to: dantanna

Next time you go night walking, don't use your flashlight. (Still take it with you though. Obviously lol)

Walk very slowly and feel the trees as you walk. Train your eyes as if you're looking distantly at something or "through" (kinda like those hidden image things). As time passes you will begin to see more and more. When you first start this it'll take up to a half hour, but after that you will be able to see a fair amount.

For me i can usually see decently well within 5 minutes. I've been using this technique for years now, though. My pappy taught me this method. He was an incredible tracker and had a sixth sense when it came to the outdoors.

Remember to walk very slowly and feel with your hands what is around you. It's amazing what your brain can do with sensory input. The more, the better.

This is how my husband's sleep pattern works for him. He works a 12 hour shift, 6pm to 6am (technically 4pm to 6am, he often clocks in much earlier than scheduled to push a lot of paper) and he usually sleeps a 4 hour block, maximum, before waking up again for an hour or two, then going back to sleep for another couple before having to get up. He swears he's not exhausted, and he genuinely does not seem it. If there's any detrimental aspect to this, it's not impacting him at all.

I think so long as you have a sleep schedule & attitude (looking forward to it, not caring about others' opinions, etc) about it that equates to relaxing/not stressful, block sleeping is probably way better for us than people think.

originally posted by: dantanna
i dont know. im nocturnal, but ive walked around the woods at night. you cannot see a thing. the only reason i can see anything is street lights, even in the middle of upstate ny, there is sometimes light creeping in from somewhere. or i have a flashlight.

no light, there is no reason to be awake at night. if i had raccoon eyes, i would love it, but no raccoon eyes here, its pitch black out there at night.

so why would they wake up for 2 hours then go back to sleep? who knows. but a 12 hour night might be the culprit, cause i only need 5-8 hours of sleep per night. my sleep cycle is i wake up at the 5 hour mark. i can then decide get up or indulge.

Yep bingo. If the day/night is 12 hours each, you're not going to sleep the full 12, so you break it up. Candles and lighting enabled us to have more things to do at night, eventually enabling us to work the full 24 hours.

But then the question arises, what'd they do when they were awake and it was dark? They could make fires, so maybe they could do things within that light. Maybe they stared at the stars more--creating astrology? In some cases it may have been useful to wake up just to make sure nothing unordinary is occurring. In fact, being a light sleeper could be a advantage if you were sleeping in the wild isolated--even until recently.

The bigger question is why break up sleep into 2 chunks? Why not 3 or 4? Or why not just sleep lightly for the full 12 hours? Well I imagine it'd be more clear if we lived back then.

originally posted by: seaswine
a reply to: dantanna

Next time you go night walking, don't use your flashlight. (Still take it with you though. Obviously lol)

Walk very slowly and feel the trees as you walk. Train your eyes as if you're looking distantly at something or "through" (kinda like those hidden image things). As time passes you will begin to see more and more. When you first start this it'll take up to a half hour, but after that you will be able to see a fair amount.

For me i can usually see decently well within 5 minutes. I've been using this technique for years now, though. My pappy taught me this method. He was an incredible tracker and had a sixth sense when it came to the outdoors.

Remember to walk very slowly and feel with your hands what is around you. It's amazing what your brain can do with sensory input. The more, the better.

He made what I think is an excellent point. Humans don't have nocturnal eyes. They're diurnal. Try doing that in a forest. It's a hell of a lot harder.
northernwoodlands.org - Night Vision: How Animals See in the Dark...

This part of the eye is common in nocturnal animals:
en.wikipedia.org - Tapetum lucidum...

I read about this a while back, and it was common in Northern Europe. People would go out visiting for a few hours during the night, leaving about two thirty, or closing time. I actually think that would be a good idea.

I tried doing this for about three days, but the rest of society is on a different schedule.

I suppose I could get up and bake bread.

Cool topic, I just read a thing about this:

In the 18th century most people did a thing called first sleep and second sleep. It worked like kind of like this. You would come home from work (or in from the fields, workplace, or where ever you got paid to work) you would eat a small meal and take a 3-4 hour nap. Then after getting up you might head out to a friends house, local tavern, or other social areas of gathering. Drink, horse around, talk trash, whatever for a few hours then go home. Sleep for another 3-4 hours, then get up and eat breakfast and head out to work (where ever that may be)

I used a sleep schedule like this in college, and it worked pretty well then. If I knew that people used to do this I could have just written a paper on it.

In Norway (Trondheim) in Summer, there wasn't any night-time. It was just a light twilight all night. The Sun would just roll along below the horizon. People were up all night doing things like painting their wooden homes, cleaning cars, doing all sorts of stuff like surfing, sailing and picnicking. They would even go swimming in the marina and harbour.

Sleep when you are sleepy.
Eat when you are hungry.
Makes for a jolly-fine fellow.