在伸手不见五指的静谧午夜，有时会发生一些小插曲：或许是一个短信到来的声音，或许是iPhone手机提醒您收到新邮件的屏幕闪动，又或许是发现自己在盯着天花板，脑海中如放映电影般回顾一天的事情。如你所知，接下来你会不顾“连续8小时睡眠是必不可少的”这一常常被提起的告诫，起床，回到现实世界。 听起来很熟悉吧？并非只有你是这样。美国疾病控制和预防中心的最新报告显示，在美国大概有4100万人口（接近总工作人口的1/3）每晚睡6小时，或者更短，这部分要归罪于科技，如它带来的短信声、屏幕闪动等。睡眠不足困扰着经济领域中的各行各业的人。 大概42%的矿工反映睡眠不足，而又27%的金融保险从业者也抱怨缺觉。 一般来说，提到越来越多的睡眠不足问题，就不得不提“晚上早睡，多睡”这一倡导。然而，这个倡导也许正是问题部分症结所在。因为这个倡导不能帮助我们获得更多的休息，“8小时连续睡眠”武断地把睡眠的概念以及如何实现好睡眠框在一个很窄的观念框里。有些时候的辗转反侧也许就是来自我们对睡眠和身体需要的错误认识。事实是，无论是我们的身体还是大脑都不是专门为那耗在床上的1/3人生时间设计的。 人们应该在晚上连续睡8个小时的观念是最近被提起的。世界各地人口以各种各样的、令人惊奇的方式睡觉。例如，上百万的中国工人仍会在午饭后趴在桌子上睡上个把小时，白天小睡在印度和西班牙等地区也很普遍。 弗吉尼亚理工学院历史学教授Roger Ekirch在20世纪90年代早期就首先证实连续睡眠8小时是不可信的。他花费数小时研究夜的历史并且开始注意到关于睡眠的奇怪文献。《坎特伯雷故事集》中的一个人物决定在“第一段睡眠”后继续睡觉。英格兰的一位医生写到，在“第一段睡眠”和“第二段睡眠”之间的时间是学习和沉思的最好时间。一位16世纪的法国内科医生总结到，工人能够生出更多的孩子是因为他们等到“第一段睡眠”后才做爱。Ekirch教授很快发现到他并不是唯一一个认识到睡眠周期交替这一历史性存在的人。一位名叫Thomas A. Wehr的精神病专家在位于马里兰州贝塞斯达的国家心理卫生研究所工作，他做了个实验，实验中处在没有人工照明环境中。没有照明，没有电灯泡、电视或者电脑的干扰，被试者最初在晚上睡觉，但是，Wehr博士注意到被试者在午夜后不久醒来，数个小时候再度入睡。这与Ekirch教授在历史文献和早期文学作品中发现的阶段性睡眠模式相同。 如果我们有机会远离现代生活，貌似我们的身体将会很自然地适应分段睡眠模式。被试者渐渐喜欢以一种新的方式经历黑夜。一旦他们抛弃“睡眠模式应该怎样怎样”的念头，他们会渴望午夜时间的到来，届时他们有深思的机会，无论是自我反省，还是给自己的一天一个跳跃式的启动，或者是想情爱的事。然而，我们大部分人并不认为午夜醒来时正常运作的信号。 医生们兜售帮助睡眠药物，并且提倡更多的睡眠，这些行为无意中强化了这样的观念：睡眠中断是有问题的或者状态不好的。我们认为自己在夜里应该获得一个好的休息，而如果我们在夜间醒来，我们就认为自己是不正常的，这样，睡眠焦虑的出现就不足为奇了。一系列的焦虑使我们失眠，一些人甚至要求助于药物或者睡眠帮助，这是个被哈佛心理学家称之为“具有讽刺意味的精神控制过程”的恶性循环。 当我们躺在床上想着自己没有获得本应该得到的睡眠时，我们自己就减少了尽享静美的夜间休息的机会。 事实是，很多最近的研究表明任何形式的深度睡眠，无论是8小时连续睡眠还是30分钟的小睡，都会让我们的大脑以更高效的水平运转，会让我们想到更好的主意，能够更快地找到解答谜题的思路，更快地识别谜团，更准确地回忆起信息。在由美国宇航局资助的研究中，其中，宾夕法尼亚大学教授David F. Dinges带领的团队研究发现，让被试者小睡仅仅24分钟就会改进他们的认知表现。 林肯大学教授Simon Durrant负责的另一项研究表明，一个被试者在小睡时的深睡眠时间可以预测其在回忆一小段有旋律的音调中的表现。纽约城市大学的研究者发现小睡的被试者比那些没有小睡的能够更好地建立各目标之间的文字关系和修饰关系。 哈佛医学院的精神病学教授Robert Stickgold提出睡眠使我们大脑有机会辨别什么样的新信息该留，什么样的该扔，这其中包括深睡眠的小睡。这就是为何我们的梦中有很多奇怪的场景和人物，这是因为大脑试图找到它最近学到了什么和在长期记忆中储存了什么二者之间的关系。快速眼动睡眠，如此叫法是因为发现这个睡眠（阶段）的研究者在看到睡着的被试者的颤动的眼皮的时候非常震惊。这个睡眠阶段是唯一一个大脑活跃度跟完全意识状态下相同的阶段，似乎能够让我们的大脑有机会产生新想法，还会让最近学到的技能更加精尖。当醒来的时候，我们的思维常常能够让我们理顺隐藏在混乱的信息背后的各种联系。 连续睡觉几个小时并不是高水平工作绩效的必要条件，人们逐渐接受了这个观念，企业渐渐地允许在工作场所午睡或者其他类似的时间安排的存在。 例如，谷歌就允许员工在工作时午睡，因为公司认为这将会提高生产效率。沃尔特里德陆军研究院行为生物系主任Thomas Balkin构想了在不久的未来可能出现的场景：军事指挥官通过看士兵手腕上的睡眠监测腕表就能够知道每个士兵在24小时总共睡了多久，然后再通过“决策判断力-疲惫”计算机模型，就可以命令士兵小睡，以便迎接下一个任务。小睡产生的认知优势可以在任何地点持续1到3小时，持续时间长短还要看人们在醒来前处在哪个睡眠阶段。 我们大多数并没有那么幸运，工作环境不允许我们在工作期间小睡，更不用说赞许小睡。越来越多的建议显示：更多地接受改变的睡眠时间表可能是我们的集体利益所在。例如，研究者已经观察到在航班期间小睡的长途飞行员在驾驶飞机的时候，在下降和着陆的关键步骤上表现较出色。 美国职业棒球大联盟的几个球队已经通过改变睡眠模式适应了长赛季的需要。德州骑兵队（Texas Rangers）前力量调节教练Fernando Montes，建议他的队员在宾馆房间睡觉时拉开窗帘，这样他们不论在哪个时区，都会在太阳升起时起床，即便这意味着8小时连续睡眠。一旦他们抵达训练场，这位前教练就会搭建一个可以让队员赛前睡觉的安静区域。队员们说在这个长赛季中他们身心感觉棒极了，多亏了这个时间安排。 德州骑兵队的战略性小睡会让我们所有人受益。没有人否定睡眠的不可或缺性。什么构成了好的夜间睡眠？对此问题，我们曾有不必要的古板的而且可能是完全过时的观念。我们要把自己从错误的观念中解放出来，只有这样，我们才会在更健康、更富有效率的时间获得更好的休息，而不是8小时的时间。Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States — nearly a third of all working adults — get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.
Typically, mention of our ever increasing sleeplessness is followed by calls for earlier bedtimes and a longer night’s sleep. But this directive may be part of the problem. Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives that we spend in bed.
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.
One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.
It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.
Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has called “the ironic processes of mental control.”
As we lie in our beds thinking about the sleep we’re not getting, we diminish the chances of enjoying a peaceful night’s rest.
This, despite the fact that a number of recent studies suggest that any deep sleep — whether in an eight-hour block or a 30-minute nap — primes our brains to function at a higher level, letting us come up with better ideas, find solutions to puzzles more quickly, identify patterns faster and recall information more accurately. In a NASA-financed study, for example, a team of researchers led by David F. Dinges, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that letting subjects nap for as little as 24 minutes improved their cognitive performance.
In another study conducted by Simon Durrant, a professor at the University of Lincoln, in England, the amount of time a subject spent in deep sleep during a nap predicted his or her later performance at recalling a short burst of melodic tones. And researchers at the City University of New York found that short naps helped subjects identify more literal and figurative connections between objects than those who simply stayed awake.
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. That could be one reason our dreams are laden with strange plots and characters, a result of the brain’s trying to find connections between what it’s recently learned and what is stored in our long-term memory. Rapid eye movement sleep — so named because researchers who discovered this sleep stage were astonished to see the fluttering eyelids of sleeping subjects — is the only phase of sleep during which the brain is as active as it is when we are fully conscious, and seems to offer our brains the best chance to come up with new ideas and hone recently acquired skills. When we awaken, our minds are often better able to make connections that were hidden in the jumble of information.
Gradual acceptance of the notion that sequential sleep hours are not essential for high-level job performance has led to increased workplace tolerance for napping and other alternate daily schedules.
Employees at Google, for instance, are offered the chance to nap at work because the company believes it may increase productivity. Thomas Balkin, the head of the department of behavioral biology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, imagines a near future in which military commanders can know how much total sleep an individual soldier has had over a 24-hour time frame thanks to wristwatch-size sleep monitors. After consulting computer models that predict how decision-making abilities decline with fatigue, a soldier could then be ordered to take a nap to prepare for an approaching mission. The cognitive benefit of a nap could last anywhere from one to three hours, depending on what stage of sleep a person reaches before awakening.
Most of us are not fortunate enough to work in office environments that permit, much less smile upon, on-the-job napping. But there are increasing suggestions that greater tolerance for altered sleep schedules might be in our collective interest. Researchers have observed, for example, that long-haul pilots who sleep during flights perform better when maneuvering aircraft through the critical stages of descent and landing.
Several Major League Baseball teams have adapted to the demands of a long season by changing their sleep patterns. Fernando Montes, the former strength and conditioning coach for the Texas Rangers, counseled his players to fall asleep with the curtains in their hotel rooms open so that they would naturally wake up at sunrise no matter what time zone they were in — even if it meant cutting into an eight-hour sleeping block. Once they arrived at the ballpark, Montes would set up a quiet area where they could sleep before the game. Players said that, thanks to this schedule, they felt great both physically and mentally over the long haul.
Strategic napping in the Rangers style 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.
SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it’s the chime of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day in your head. Next thing you know, you’re out of bed and engaged with the world, once again ignoring the often quoted fact that eight straight hours of sleep is essential.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States — nearly a third of all working adults — get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.
Typically, mention of our ever increasing sleeplessness is followed by calls for earlier bedtimes and a longer night’s sleep. But this directive may be part of the problem. Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives that we spend in bed.
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.
One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.
It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.
Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has called “the ironic processes of mental control.”
As we lie in our beds thinking about the sleep we’re not getting, we diminish the chances of enjoying a peaceful night’s rest.
This, despite the fact that a number of recent studies suggest that any deep sleep — whether in an eight-hour block or a 30-minute nap — primes our brains to function at a higher level, letting us come up with better ideas, find solutions to puzzles more quickly, identify patterns faster and recall information more accurately. In a NASA-financed study, for example, a team of researchers led by David F. Dinges, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that letting subjects nap for as little as 24 minutes improved their cognitive performance.
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. That could be one reason our dreams are laden with strange plots and characters, a result of the brain’s trying to find connections between what it’s recently learned and what is stored in our long-term memory. Rapid eye movement sleep — so named because researchers who discovered this sleep stage were astonished to see the fluttering eyelids of sleeping subjects — is the only phase of sleep during which the brain is as active as it is when we are fully conscious, and seems to offer our brains the best chance to come up with new ideas and hone recently acquired skills. When we awaken, our minds are often better able to make connections that were hidden in the jumble of information.
Gradual acceptance of the notion that sequential sleep hours are not essential for high-level job performance has led to increased workplace tolerance for napping and other alternate daily schedules.
Employees at Google, for instance, are offered the chance to nap at work because the company believes it may increase productivity. Thomas Balkin, the head of the department of behavioral biology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, imagines a near future in which military commanders can know how much total sleep an individual soldier has had over a 24-hour time frame thanks to wristwatch-size sleep monitors. After consulting computer models that predict how decision-making abilities decline with fatigue, a soldier could then be ordered to take a nap to prepare for an approaching mission. The cognitive benefit of a nap could last anywhere from one to three hours, depending on what stage of sleep a person reaches before awakening.
Most of us are not fortunate enough to work in office environments that permit, much less smile upon, on-the-job napping. But there are increasing suggestions that greater tolerance for altered sleep schedules might be in our collective interest. Researchers have observed, for example, that long-haul pilots who sleep during flights perform better when maneuvering aircraft through the critical stages of descent and landing.
Several Major League Baseball teams have adapted to the demands of a long season by changing their sleep patterns. Fernando Montes, the former strength and conditioning coach for the Texas Rangers, counseled his players to fall asleep with the curtains in their hotel rooms open so that they would naturally wake up at sunrise no matter what time zone they were in — even if it meant cutting into an eight-hour sleeping block. Once they arrived at the ballpark, Montes would set up a quiet area where they could sleep before the game. Players said that, thanks to this schedule, they felt great both physically and mentally over the long haul.
Strategic napping in the Rangers style 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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