I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented.
By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.
> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule
> An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.
I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store.
I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon".
Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night.
This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by.
By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5).
Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…
1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am.
2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise.
3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.
"norms", ha!
anyone who thinks there are norms, isn't normal.
in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff,
shift worker(which shift?, split shift)
et fucking cetera.
The article is ignoring the effects of latitude completely. Solar days are very different in southern europe like greece or spain compared to e.g. nordics (norway/sweden/finland).
Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic
I really hate modern time schedule. It's nightmare to be forced to get up 6am or 7am every workday since childhood. The only relief is natural wakeup on weekend.
I see these claims pop up occasionally and I have found them both very overstated but potentially insightful.
With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not.
However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible.
There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1]
But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility.
Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep.
My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired.
References
* [1] Hunter Gather Sleep study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01157-4
* Why We Nap
* The Old Way
* Keep the River on Your Right
Not sure I get the point of the author. I really like the Mediterranean schedule but it's far from "solar based" we stay up until midnight normally.
I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc.
It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...
When I first started working as a teenager and later in my 20s, I found it shockingly cruel that I am somehow not supposed to have any work slowdown at all in the early afternoon, and especially not supposed to take even a short rest around 2pm when myself and everyone else's bodies slow down to finish digesting lunch. It's a human rhythm that most of us have, along with the second wind around 3 or 4pm, but we have to pretend every single day that it isn't happening, leading to huge caffeine consumption. Just let me lay my head down for 15 min on my desk ffs!
23 comments
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By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
> An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.
I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
Same as people in Morocco 'working hard' for 12h per day while sleeping half of the time haha
I'm socialist but this is insanity
I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night.
This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by.
By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am.
2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise.
3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.
I really like this website's design. It is functional and easy to parse, more websites should be like this.
in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff, shift worker(which shift?, split shift) et fucking cetera.
Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic
With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not.
However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible.
There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1]
But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility.
Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep.
My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired.
References
I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc.
It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...