There are numerous articles about how much sleep we should get, the right temperature, what is the optimal time to go to bed, and so on. Personally, I like the idea of segmented/bimodal sleep.
This consists of two sleeps. One in the early evening and the other early morning. In the between the two sleep times, a person can do whatever they wanted.
I find the concept appealing since I have experienced times when I needed to pull all-nighter to complete some assignment. My most productive times are between 3am and 5am. Anytime before or after that I am getting things done through sheer will-power. Often the work needs to be reviewed multiple times because something is still wrong. In my ideal situation, I would go to bed around 8pm. I would spend the waking time reading or writing because I do not have much time for either of those during the day. Then, its back to sleep until the morning when I need to do daytime tasks.
As much as I would like to be a segmented sleeper, it is really difficult to do. Sometimes its the people around me. Everyone is busy up until they go to sleep around 11pm and I tend to get pulled into helping or talking with them. So far, I've found that I either need 6 or 8 hours of sleep. If I don't get those hours, then there is a good chance I will need caffeine or nap to get through the day. I've also found that if I do not wake at 5, 6, or 8am, then I crawl out of bed in a grouchy mood.
So here I was browsing through /r/EverythingScience trying to stay awake in the middle of the day when I found this article, "Our ancestors probably didn't get eight hours a night, either".
This piece described a study on tribes living our ancestor's life of hunting and gathering. The main purpose was to monitor their sleeping habits. The researchers guessed that the tribes would more closely follow the sleep patterns of our ancestors. In the end, they concluded that people who live near the equator do not have segmented sleep. Instead the tribes people slept for about 6 hours straight and are able to get through the day without a afternoon nap. The researchers reasoned that the accounts of having two sleeps came from people who lived further away from the equator and had longer nights, thus there was less of a need to always be asleep when it was dark.
Well, so much for further proof that we should be bimodal sleepers. I'll keep my fingers crossed. Until then, I will continue to wonder how some people are able to rush around all day after getting less than 8 hours of sleep.
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