{"id":1321,"date":"2012-02-24T02:43:13","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T06:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thiscontemplativelife.com\/?p=1321"},"modified":"2012-02-24T02:43:13","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T06:43:13","slug":"the-myth-of-the-eight-hour-sleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/2012\/02\/24\/the-myth-of-the-eight-hour-sleep\/","title":{"rendered":"The myth of the eight-hour sleep"},"content":{"rendered":"


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We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.<\/span><\/p>\n

His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Full article:\u00a0BBC News – The myth of the eight-hour sleep<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thiscontemplativelife.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}