Sleep: is it normal to wake up in the middle of the night?

Sleep: is it normal to wake up in the middle of the night?

Forget everything you know about sleep.  Doing so just might help you get a full night’s rest.

Let’s start with the notion that human beings need 8 hours of continuous sleep.  We probably don’t.  But thinking that we do can easily trigger sleep anxiety, which on its own can cause a person nightmares.  

Blame Thomas Edison, if you must (or, perhaps, the city of Paris which in 1667 became the first city in the world to light its streets).  Prior to the advent of the light bulb, and the Industrial Revolution, human beings were known to sleep in two segments, known as “first sleep” and “second sleep.”  That is, people would go to bed after sunset, wake up roughly four hours later (for an hour or two, or three), then return to bed for their “second sleep,” of another lengthy duration. 

Sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs, as quoted in a BBC World Service report, maintains that “Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.”  And historian and author Roger Ekirch would quite agree.  The Virginia Tech professor spent over 15 years researching historical sleep patterns and revealed his findings on segmented sleep in a landmark paper, published in 2001 (four years later he authored a book titled “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past”). 

Ekirch, quoted in the web site www.lifeslittlemysteries.com, said that sometime in the 18^th and 19^th century “language changed and references to segmented sleep fell away. . . . Now people call it insomnia.” By the 1920s, according to the BBC article, “the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.” The BBC article continued: “[Ekirch] attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses – which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.”

The notion that segmented sleep is our natural state is backed by research undertaken 20 years ago by Thomas Wehr, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Health. Explains an article at www.t-nation.com:

“Wehr did experiments where he kept humans away from artificial light of any kind. After a couple of weeks, they started to fall asleep early – right after the sun went down – and then wake up after midnight. They'd lie awake for an hour or so and then fall back asleep. . . . Deprived of light, the subjects resorted to historical norms, dividing up their sleep into two distinct periods. . . . Wehr also found that this period between the first sleep and the second sleep was the most relaxing time of the day, almost akin to some yogi-like meditation. He confirmed this observation biochemically as he found that subjects were pumping out large amounts of prolactin, the post-orgasm hormone, during this mid-sleep period.”

How much sleep do we need? Is 8 hours the right number?

Not only is the verdict out on this, but one study in particular – collating results from a million subjects – found that people who averaged between 6-7 hours a night ended up living longer than those who grabbed 8 hours (or more).  Given that the U.S., by and large, is a sleep-deprived nation, no one is advocating that people cut back on their sleep, but the notion that you’re getting less than eight a night might again be causing unnecessary sleep anxiety. 

And how about naps?  How effective are they? 

Wrote David Randall, in an article for the New York Times: “The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.”

Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, proposes that sleep — including short naps that include deep sleep — offers our brains the chance to decide what new information to keep and what to toss. Said Stickgold, in an NRP-led roundtable discussion on sleep:

“. . . [W]e've done some studies looking at naps in terms of the memory processing and have been rather stunned, really, by the fact that in almost every experiment that we've tried, an hour-and-a-half nap seems to do as much good for memory processing as an entire night of sleep, and we continue to ponder that and sort of conclude that OK, we just don't get it yet. But in studies where six hours of sleep at night seems not enough to lead to consolidation of memory of a particular task, an-hour-and-a-half nap will. So there's something, at least from the memory perspective, rather magical and unusually efficient about napping as opposed to nocturnal sleep.”

David Dinges, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine undertook a series of studies on the effectiveness of naps, giving volunteers a series of tests on memory, alertness, response time, and other cognitive skills (they also measured biological systems, such as core body temperature and hormone levels). No surprise, Dinges found that longer naps were better, but some cognitive functions benefited more from napping than others.  Said Dinges, as quoted in a NASA article: "To our amazement, working memory performance benefited from the naps, [but] vigilance and basic alertness did not benefit very much," Dinges continued: "Working memory . . . involves focusing attention on one task while holding other tasks in memory ... and is a fundamental ability critical to performing complex work [like piloting a spaceship]. A poor working memory could result in errors."

Concluded Randall, author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep: “Strategic napping . . . could benefit us all. No one argues that sleep is not essential. But freeing ourselves from needlessly rigid and quite possibly outdated ideas about what constitutes a good night’s sleep might help put many of us to rest, in a healthy and productive, if not eight-hour long, block.”

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Where are you from? (not such a simple question)

Where are you from? (not such a simple question)

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

Give it a try. The next time you walk into Subway on Daniel Island, ask my good friend David where he’s from.  You’ll certainly enjoy his answer, a simple: “Planet Earth.”

Our planet has seen the birth of more than 110 billion people – 7 billion of whom now roam the earth.  I often refer to these 7 billion as “fellow travelers,” given that we travel together through space – same vehicle, same direction, same course. And, by and large, we do the same things – look after our families, look after each other, explore, create, connect.

Nonetheless, we consistently draw lines that separate us from one another – through religion, race, nationality, economics or politics.

Four years ago, NPR host Michele Norris created The Race Card Project “to solicit people’s frank, unfiltered thoughts on race,” according to an article in The Atlantic. Since then, the article explained, “she has received tens of thousands of responses, from people in 63 countries” and one of the most common submissions, Norris explains, “is some formulation of ‘So, where are you really from?’ Adds Norris, as quoted in the Atlantic: “To a lot of people that hits their ear the wrong way. It feels like someone is trying to point out their otherness: ‘You’re quite obviously not American, so where are you from?’”

I must admit, when I hear someone with an accent (whether I’m hopping a cab to the airport or ordering a drink at a corner café), I frequently ask: “Where are you from?” I hope that I’m not offending anyone, and I’m asking out of genuine interest in their story, their background, their life. I view the question as a simple social rejoinder, a way to connect with a fellow traveler.  But for many, I now realize, particularly Americans who (forgive the phrase) don’t “look” American, it’s often not a happy question.

Listen to Teresa Volcheck of Des Moines, Iowa, who shared her thoughts with The Race Card Project: 

“I am a Korean adoptee, raised in central Nebraska. I do not have an accent. I had a Swedish last name growing up and now have a Czech last name. I often get asked, where are you from? I say, ‘Nebraska.’ Then I get, “Really, where are you from?’ I have never self-identified as Korean-American and find it puzzling that people need to know this information. I do not know my biological family. I have a Korean adopted brother and growing up, we were often asked if we were REAL brother and sister (we are not biologically related). Is ‘real’ and ‘biological’ the same? Isn’t family more than just blood relations?”

Or listen to cartoonist Vishavjit Singh:

" ‘Where are you from?’ This is one of the most common questions hurled my way in public. My quick response is: from right here in the U.S. For many this is not a satisfying response, so they prod further. But where are you from really? Okay, I am from all over. Born in Washington, DC, I spent my childhood in India, went to college and graduate school in California, then moved to the East Coast. So you are from India? No, my parents are, but I am American.

“That’s the end of this discourse in just about all instances. The innate urge on the part of many of my fellow Americans to somehow place me firmly in the ‘foreign’ category is amusing and frustrating at the same time. There is no such thing as an American ‘look’, yet the juxtaposition of beard and turban in our contemporary times seems to mark me as the ultimate ‘other’.

“I am a cartoonist, a writer, a costume player, a software engineer, married, turbaned, bearded, American, Sikh -- just to name a few. While all of these identifications are true, they don’t contain the essence of who I am.”

The Great Floating Tribe

In a stirring TED talk, global author Pico Iyer talks about the “great floating tribe,” noting that “the number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million, and that’s an almost unimaginable number.” The “age of movement,” Iyer points out, allows us to now “choose our sense of home, create our sense of community, fashion our sense of self, and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents' age. No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan, partly raised in Indonesia, has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law.”

Adds Iyer:

“I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. Certainly when I'm traveling, especially to the major cities of the world, the typical person I meet today will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris. And as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognizes him as kin. She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. So they become friends. They fall in love. They move to New York City. Or Edinburgh.

“And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places. And potentially, everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world, writes about the world, thinks about the world, could be something different, because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures.”

So the next time you ask a fellow traveler “Where are you from?,” be mindful. The question holds great power – to connect, or divide.  It all depends on our intent. 

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