Insomnia

Ellen your post is what I needed to hear! THANK YOU!
I've down loaded the book and have already read the forward and Chap 1, I feel hopeful again. I know that understanding Sleep and what's actually needed will set my fears at ease. You hit the nail on the head with the vicious cycle of fear-symptom-more fear.
Ellen, May I ask how long you've been battling insomnia and how far into treatment? How is your sleep situation now?
I have to agree on the sleep hygiene comment as well. I've followed that to a T and it hasn't made a huge difference.
Walt, I agree with the breathing exercises. It always brings really nice yawns which is a nice benefit. Thank you for sharing it!
I will put Sarno's book aside "Divided Mind" for the moment because I think reading "Say Goodnight To Insomnia" will help me over this hurdle immensely.

BTW I did suffer chronic neck pain and headaches for 15 years until I discovered Dr. Sarno. Drs repeatly to stop any heavy lifting, high intensity workouts, gardening, heavy housework blah blah blah. I've been TOTALLY pain free, no headaches these past 4 years.
I squat 100lbs (3 sets of 8). Dead lift 125 lbs (3 sets of 6). I have two beautiful organic vegetable gardens, orchids, and roses. I'm 53 years old. So that is testimony to what MindBody healing can do. I have no doubt TMS is curable....I just wasn't sure about insomnia being in that classification with out a specific pain attached. What an interesting journey. Thank you all!

As we say in Hawaii
Much Aloha and my deepest Mahalo!

 

Also what I found was that I HAD to make myself STOP stressing about not sleeping. It is such a part of the problem... as you have obviously found out. Taking control of your mind and NOT allowing it to start worrying about the whole idea of sleeping is imperative. Not easy to do - but - like with a small child (I treat my mind like an unreasonable 4 yr old - it seems about the right level..!) distraction is the best policy, along with seeing it through. I remember my mother telling me when I was a kid and could not sleep that I could choose to read or not, to have the light on or not, but I absolutely had to be lying down in bed and there was NO argument! Since she has slept so little since the 2nd world war I'm not really sure she is the best advisor! But I take the same 'no nonsense' line with myself. As soon as any 'no sleeping' worry/stress comes up, I banish the thought and replace it with another. Either by reading or doing a crossword, or by directing my mind to a well-known meditation or relaxation technique, or by a word game in my head. As long as it is something that is quite easy to do, but takes up a lot of concentration. I have found this to work and still do it several nights a week. My sleep patterns are SO improved from years past tho'.
So don't worry about long-term problems with no sleep cos it will increase your problems not help you solve them! My mum is looking good for 75 years old and she hasn't slept properly since the second world war!!
And I agree with Walt n Ellen - calmness is good, I do not watch news or read newspapers or magazines and I turn over the radio if news comes on - we just don't need to be bombarded with other peoples troubles when we have enough of our own. Any spare moments on the day, fit in some mindfulness, meditation and conscious breathing, it WILL improve things. But allow it time - as soon as you 'call' TMS - it tends to panic and try and hook you harder - so be aware and just keep on doing the work until it is successful.

 

The myth of the eight-hour sleep
Comments (321)
By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service


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.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.
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.
Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night
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.
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

Between segments

Some people:

• Jog and take photographs
• Practise yoga
• Have dinner...

• Ten strange things people do at night

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

When segmented sleep was the norm

• "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
• "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
• "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale
• The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night

Source: Roger Ekirch

• Roger Ekirch's website
• Find your personal sleep profile

In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened.
"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.
"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."
That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.
This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.
In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
A small city like Leipzig in central Germany employed 100 men to tend to 700 lamps
London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night.
Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds."
Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.
"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.
"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

Stages of sleep
Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

• Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops
• Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it
• Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body
• After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream

In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep
Source: Gregg Jacobs

• Gregg Jacobs' site - CBT for Insomnia
• Find out more about the science behind sleep

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.
This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.
The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.
"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."
The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.
Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.
"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."
But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

More from the Magazine

• Margaret Thatcher was famously said to get by on four hours sleep a night
• That put her in a group of just 1% of the population

• Can we really get by on four hours of sleep?
• Weird things people do in their sleep

"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says.
Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.
In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.
"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up."
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.
Craig Koslofsky and Russell Foster appeared on The Forum from the BBC World Service. Listen to the programme here.
Do you sleep in segments? Send us your sleep stories.

 

That makes a lot of sense doesn't it? Explains how some people can get by on less sleep or on sleep at different times. Interesting about the 1-2 hr gap between 1st and 2nd sleeps - as many people say they wake after a few hours and then cannot get back to sleep. Knowing that it is perfectly natural - might help to dispel the stress of not sleeping...

 

Busted! OK, I'm not working on my insomnia right now, but......
I was making progress on it, but then ended up on a stressful work assignment away from home and I've fallen back into the sleeping aid trap. I fully intend to start working on it again as soon as I get home and into a normal routine again at the end of June.

I've had insomnia most of my life. I've been able to overcome the kind of insomnia that is due to thinking too much before falling asleep. But the remaining insomnia is from the unconscious, and I feel it comes from a deep level of fear of letting go or losing control. So addressing fear is primary in my recovery. Calming the nervous system with deep belly breathing was very helpful. But as I stated previously, losing the fear of not sleeping is a critical component. Acceptance is so key in all TMS healing.

Keep us informed of how you're doing. I will report back when I start addressing my insomnia again.

 

Some great information Tennis Tom! Thank you for posting and hectate 105 for sharing your story. Yes, I have been reading and learning about sleep and the lack of it these past few days. The book Ellen suggested has been wonderful in helping to calm my fears and anxiety. Also reading all this info here on the forum has been helpful, I'm resting more peacefully. I've just begun the 6 week program listed in the book " Goodnight to Insomnia". Its day 2 and I'm already making some baby steps. On Day 1 I did use my usual dosage of natural sleep aide but now will taper down to half for a few days as not to experience rebound ( which I might have been going through). Although melatonin supposedly has no addiction qualities( it has been noted a small percentage have experienced a rebound effect but not as significant to prescription sleep aides) I know it's a psychological addiction.
Using a half dose last night I did get about 4 hours non consecutive. I'm Feeling good this AM. I do find going to bed later is key, not to spend more than 7-8 in bed helps immensely! Also a key factor is using PST ( positive sleep talk).

Last night I Enjoyed a candlelight restorative yoga class that was a Hour and half which primarily focuses on relaxation and breathing.

The Biggest lesson I learned is to stop stressing over not sleeping!!!! Main stream media has fooled us into thinking if you don't get 8 hours it can cause health issues. Not true! Getting over that myth is half the battle. So I've had no anxiety for 2 days
Ellen please keep me posted on your journey.
I'm confident that Using the knowledge of TMS and this 6 week program will be a win win situation ...guarantee!
I'll keep you updated
Sweet dreams and again

A big Mahalo to you All!

 

Hello All!
Just a quick note to say that I am beating my insomnia! I'm Sleeping through the night (with some slight difficulty with falling to sleep though, but will have that beat in no time). You MUST read the book "The Effortless Sleep Method" by Sasha Stephens. I chose to follow her advice. One of her promises she asks of you to follow is to stay off of insomnia chat links, ( she makes some good points as to why) so this will be my last post. I just wanted to give you hope, it can be cured! My TMS tools and what I've learned recently is a sure bet to victory! Best wishes to everyone here and may you have sweet dreams and a peaceful night ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.......

Aloha and Maholo!
Islandso

 

Islandsno,

I hope you are still sleeping well. I wanted to follow up, as promised, on how I'm doing with my insomnia. Once I got back home from my overseas work assignment I've been sleeping very well without once using Ambien or any other sleeping aid. It has been two weeks now. It's like I never had insomnia. I believe the reason for my success is that the 'knowledge therapy' from the books discussed above finally seeped into my unconscious. Once I stopped caring whether I slept or not and was able to rid myself of the fear of not sleeping, I've been sleeping quite well. The only 'sleep hygiene' technique I'm using is during the one incident I had of waking up at 3am and not being able to fall back asleep, I got out of bed until I was sleepy, then went back to bed. But I think that incident was due more to jet lag than TMS insomnia.

Another factor in my long history of insomnia that I just recently became aware of, is that for about 20 years I was taking a long acting form of a beta blocker on a daily basis to prevent migraines. Because my migraines finally stopped due to practicing TMS healing techniques, I was able to gradually wean myself off of this medication this past winter. When doing so, I did some research about this medication and found out that insomnia is a frequent side effect in that it disrupts melatonin production. I had seen several doctors for my sleep problems and had undergone two sleep studies during my long difficulty with insomnia, and never once did anyone say that maybe the beta blocker was causing my sleep problems. Oh well, it's not like I lost sleep over this or anything. Like many members on this Forum, I have many worse horror stories I could relate regarding problems with prescribed medication.

Anyway, I'm happy to report that I'm sleeping well currently.

 

The myth of the eight-hour sleep
Comments (321)
By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service

Continue reading the main story
In today's Magazine

• The long, dark walk to the toilet
• The story of a 60-year-old hijacking
• Statistically the greatest World Cup?
• How Patio cola changed the world of fizzy drinks

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.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

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.

Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night
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.

Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

Continue reading the main story
Between segments

Some people:

• Jog and take photographs
• Practise yoga
• Have dinner...

• Ten strange things people do at night

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.

He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

Continue reading the main story
When segmented sleep was the norm

• "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
• "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
• "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale
• The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night

Source: Roger Ekirch

• Roger Ekirch's website
• Find your personal sleep profile

In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened.

"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.

"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."

That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.

This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.

In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.

A small city like Leipzig in central Germany employed 100 men to tend to 700 lamps
London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night.

Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.

"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds."

Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.

"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.

"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

Continue reading the main story
Stages of sleep
Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

• Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops
• Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it
• Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body
• After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream

In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep

Source: Gregg Jacobs

• Gregg Jacobs' site - CBT for Insomnia
• Find out more about the science behind sleep

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.

This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.

The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.

"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."

The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.

"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."

But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

Continue reading the main story
More from the Magazine

• Margaret Thatcher was famously said to get by on four hours sleep a night
• That put her in a group of just 1% of the population

• Can we really get by on four hours of sleep?
• Weird things people do in their sleep

"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says.

Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.

In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.

"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up."

So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.

Craig Koslofsky and Russell Foster appeared on The Forum from the BBC World Service. Listen to the programme here.

Do you sleep in segments? Send us your sleep stories.

Your comments (321)

Related Internet links

• Dr Gregg Jacobs - CBT for Insomnia
• Sleep A Very Short Introduction - Oxford University Press
• Craig Koslofsky - University of Illinois

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites

--> Jump to comments pagination

• Editors' Picks
• All Comments (321)

• 
  +2
  Comment number 180.
  CarolinePJ
  22nd February 2012 - 17:47
  If I don't get my second sleep - usually from about 3-7am - I feel completely drunk/hungover for the rest of the day, even without alcohol! The liver is most active in repairing and filtering between 2 and 4 am. So if you are going to have two sleeps better to wake up around midnight, or before, so you give your body a chance to recover from the previous day!
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  +5
  Comment number 163.
  bbcrdr
  22nd February 2012 - 16:53
  "In1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets"
  Non-sense! The Muslims of Spain were way ahead of their time, having developed street lighting when all of Europe was in absolute darkness!
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  +13
  Comment number 162.
  Pdibbs
  22nd February 2012 - 16:57
  Anyone who has a newborn child knows what it's like to sleep in 4-hour bursts. I've never heard a single one say something positive about it
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  +3
  Comment number 156.
  Lordmvarder
  22nd February 2012 - 16:48
  Your body works on ~29 hour day so we are constantly adjusting our body clocks. As a shift worker I pay attention to my circadian rhythm and sleep in multiples of 90 minutes as this is the natural routine for a body from light sleep to deep sleep and back again. It takes me around 15 minutes to get to sleep so i go to bed 7h45m before I need to get up. Try it, it takes a while to feel the benefit
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  +6
  Comment number 143.
  Lavistas
  22nd February 2012 - 16:29
  I worked as a baker for several years and simply got used to sleeping two 4 hour periods every day. 11-3 and 1-5. Once I stopped, I quickly fell back into an 8 hour an night pattern. My dad was a baker all his life and even when he stopped, he would still get up at 4am. You can get used to it - as long as your body gets the chance to rest and recuperate.
  
  
  

Comments 5 of 8