In the last two years, many people have had different work and rest habits than before due to the conditions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Under these conditions, sleep becomes fragmented for many of them, whether voluntarily or not, given the levels of stress in this period. Thus, unwittingly, they brought back a natural cycle that was thought to be a pattern centuries ago.
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Back then, many people would go to sleep as soon as the sun went down and wake up three or four hours later. Then they socialized, read, ate small meals, and had sex for an hour or two, and then slept for another three to four hours. Only when artificial light was introduced did people start forcing themselves to sleep at night, said Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech.
The new routine with artificial light
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, everything changed, with an emphasis on profit and productivity, so that people who should limit sleep to a time interval had an advantage. With that, light, increasingly popular, allowed people to stay awake longer hours of the day and, consequently, sleep later.
Thus, based on a study published in 2010 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 30% of people reported waking up at least three times during their sleep. Also, in a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, 25% of adults suffer from insomnia today.
Therefore, the pandemic was able to stimulate this pattern of behavior in several people, due to the flexibility of schedules. However, doctors cannot say whether this is a healthy way, as they do not know the long-term effect of this.
medicine against insomnia
It seems that, for some people, segmented sleep has been a way to combat the bouts of insomnia that many of them suffer from. For example, for 33-year-old Danielle Hughes, this sleep method served as medicine. With that, she started to sleep from 2:00 am to 6:00 am and from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm. She also says that her anxiety due to sleepless nights began to decrease.
Thus, in many cases, fragmented sleep can be a good solution, but ideally this only happens to people who already have trouble sleeping. Yeah, for cases of anxiety caused by bad sleep, they really are usually a solution.