It would seem that we should already know everything about sleep. And we know almost nothing! We have been sleeping for almost half our lives and still cannot penetrate into some of the main secrets of a special state of the brain, an intricate dotted line linked to the real life of a person.
Should I take a nap after dinner?
A normal person usually sleeps 6-8 hours a day, although depending on the degree of fatigue and other factors, these limits fluctuate within 4-10 hours. According to recent studies, a man needs an even number of hours to get enough sleep: 6 or 8, and a woman takes an odd number of 5, 7 or 9 hours.
There are also pathological cases when people hibernate for several days or, conversely, turn off for only a couple of tens of minutes a day.
Leafing through popular literature, you are convinced that insomnia is one of the most exhausting human torments. Perhaps the most convincing method of getting rid of this ailment (of course, not in its malicious manifestations) is considered to be a set of simple rules, sanitary perfected at the beginning of the 20th century:
go to bed only when you want to sleep; use the bed only for sleep and sex; if you cannot fall asleep, do not lie in bed for more than 10 minutes - the bed should be associated only with falling asleep quickly; in the morning, wake up at the same time - by the alarm clock; stay awake during the day Promotional video:
Alas, these rules can only be followed by very inveterate egoists and pedants. A number of points are confirmed by people who have lived a long life with too much discipline. So, Anastasia Tsvetaeva said that she only went to bed to sleep and never just lie around. And Leo Tolstoy, who called for "sleeping as little as possible", quite often liked to take a nap after dinner.
By the way, on the last point: a recent study conducted in Greece by the University of Athens Medical School in conjunction with Harvard University confirmed that a half-hour afternoon nap at least three times a week reduces the risk of death from a heart attack by 37 percent.
Scientists have tried to establish the required amount of sleep for certain occupations.
So, astronauts need to sleep 2 hours during the day and 4 hours at night. Airplane pilots must take a 40 minute nap after lunch. A 10-minute nap is equivalent to a 30-minute night's sleep. In any case, you should not go to bed at all after 4 pm. And according to the precepts of the ancestors, in no case should you fall asleep at sunset, no matter how drowsy it might be! It was believed to be life-threatening.
Siesta inevitably
From time immemorial, many creative personalities preferred to work in the quiet of the night, not to mention today, with the current level of city noise and the incessant chirping of mobile phones. In the 21st century, the typical insomnia due to social networks has spread, where people, often constrained and lonely in life, find a virtual, but still quite live company on Facebook or Vkontakte.
After all, climatic conditions are also not the last circumstance. In a 50-degree heat, it won't hurt to work. In European countries, where uniform heat is observed by noon, residents prefer to retire at home in a cool, shuttered room, better with air conditioning, and take a nap after a light lunch. Such a dream is called a siesta.
In general, it is believed that an afternoon breakdown naturally occurs 8 hours after waking up in the morning, regardless of whether a person is having lunch or not. It is recommended to sleep no more than 30 minutes (so as not to provoke nighttime insomnia). But then, on a cool evening, you can sit longer in the street pub and have a glass or two of good wine, watching with everyone the broadcast of a football match on the big screen. A typical picture even for the smallest towns in summer Spain!
Siesta, according to scientists, improves blood circulation, relieves stress, prevents hypertension, increases efficiency and allows you to stay awake until late at night. Suffice it to say that such clever people as Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein were adherents of this habit (they "contracted" it in Cuba). As a result, their performance has become simply phenomenal.
Today, even office workers are not prohibited from relaxing for 15-20 minutes and pokemar at the computer for two or three hours.
Visit at night
And recently, a sensational article appeared in the foreign press that our ancestors generally slept not like we did, but twice a night! And a continuous eight-hour sleep in the dark is a habit of the last centuries.
The discovery belongs to Roger Ekirch, professor of history at Virginia Tech. Having studied a large amount of fiction, notes, court documents and personal papers, he came to the conclusion that people in Europe undoubtedly slept twice a night, and this custom was ubiquitous and common - nowhere it is emphasized as something strange. Ekirch outlined his theory in the book "At the end of the day: the night in the past."
So, apparently, in the 18th century (before the era of electricity) people slept like this: at about half past eight in the evening they lay down on the side. At about half past three in the morning, they woke up and stayed awake for two or three hours, and then rested again until morning. In the nighttime interval of full consciousness, someone was praying, someone was reading (by candlelight), and someone, with God's blessing, made love. It was considered quite decent to visit the neighbors, of course, after dressing.
How else to explain that the doctor prescribed for the patient to study and think "the time between the first and second sleep"? And why in "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (XIV century) does the heroine go to bed after the "first dream"?..
There were whole religious rituals, special prayers designed to fill this quiet island of wakefulness.
The lantern that turned life
With the rapid development of civilization, "double" sleep began to go away. Unless the ancient grandmothers, according to an old habit, roamed about their family estates with a candle in their hands, frightening to death the grandchildren who came to visit!
Ekirch believes that the reorientation of double sleep to full night sleep came with the advent of street and soon home lighting. The writer Craig Kozlowski in his book "Evening Empire" develops an idea: with the advent of lanterns, late darkness (let's call it early at night) dramatically reduced the activity of criminals.
It stimulated an active life in society and became fit for work. The two dreams that lost those hours of early night turned out to be too great a luxury for humanity. Gradually, cafes began to appear in the cities, where this time passed after work in a very pleasant way with friends.
Russian man and French princess
In Russia, of course, everything was a little different. A peasant's working day in the summer was 14-15 hours a day. In the afternoon, the "white slaves" (in the words of A. Herzen), of course, arranged a break for sleep. Not laziness, but in compensation for too short a night's sleep. In winter, work did not exceed two hours a day for men and 4-5 hours for women; and at this time of the year they slept 2-3 hours longer than in summer. On average, on weekdays, the peasant's sleep did not exceed 7.5 hours a day.
The aristocracy had everything turned upside down. From pre-revolutionary France came the fashion to wake up at sunset and go to bed at dawn. Like French women, our ladies began to believe that "the sun is for the rabble"!
So, the beautiful princess Avdotya Golitsyna (Princesse Nocturne), with whom Pushkin and Vyazemsky were in love, never in principle appeared in daylight! In her mansion on Millionnaya, she gathered liberal intellectuals exclusively at night.
And they had such an opportunity! Military personnel went to service by six in the morning, civilians by eight. By two o'clock in the afternoon they were already at home, and, having decently rested, by seven went to private evenings, which usually ended at two in the morning. Or by three, if after the ball there was another dinner …
“The right to get up as late as possible was a kind of sign of aristocracy, separating the non-serving nobleman not only from the common people or fellows pulling the strap, but also from the village landowner-owner,” writes Yuri Lotman.
The insidious Grandison wakes you up
Nowadays, an interesting experiment was carried out: 15 men existed for a month in conditions of limited hours of daylight. After sleeping off (which everyone dreams of), the test subjects began to wake up in the middle of the night, that is, they recovered two dreams! Within 12 hours, they almost all slept for 4-5 hours, then stayed awake for a couple of hours, then fell asleep again. The total sleep was no more than eight hours.
But apart from the relict double sleep that appeared, scientists were even more interested in the state of the subjects in the interval between the two blackouts. Each noted that he was unusually calm and that the state resembled meditation.
Russell Foster, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford, believes that for all our ingrained biases and habits, waking up in the middle of the night shouldn't cause panic. “This means that the person is just experiencing a relapse of the bimodal sleep pattern inherited from their ancestors,” he explains.
At the same time, it is clear that in our time, sleeping twice a night is somehow inconvenient, it does not give any advantages, and besides, it can seriously scare the family. We are so accustomed to our "grave" 8-hour sleep, into which we fall after a hard day!
And it is unlikely that humanity will agree to return to a "rational" schedule: getting up early, going to bed early. However, Douglas Rushkoff, in The Shock of the Present: When Everything Happens Right Now, writes: “Yes, we are in a chronobiological crisis with depression, suicide, cancer, poor performance and social discomfort. And all this because we break and knock the rhythms that support us and are synchronized with nature and with each other."
"But I'm not sure I'll start sleeping twice a night!" - continues Rushkoff. In his opinion, modern man has no other choice but to accept a new sensation, a new course of time and correspond to it.
Nevertheless, Russian scientists note: lately, night awakenings of people have become more and more frequent. Many experts say directly: for good health, you need to sleep three times a day: twice at night and once during the day.
So if, having fallen asleep at nine or ten in the evening, at three in the morning you suddenly woke up and, as they say, in no eye, you do not need to panic, rush in bed and drink valocordin. Most likely, your great-great-great-great-grandmother sends you greetings, who two centuries ago at that moment was reveling in the "History of the Cavalier Grandison" or imagining herself in the place of Bogdanovich's "Darling".
Andrey Arder