Envisioning 2.0

Roger Ekirch wrote a great essay that was published in this Sunday’s New York Times focusing on how we sleep today versus in the past. It seems recent reports that sales of sleep aids like Ambien and Lunesta are soaring inspired him to write this article.

Ekirch asserts that we’ve never slept better and that we may be “running too quickly to the medicine cabinet.” Incidentally, Ekirch wrote an intriguing book (which is on my list of must-reads) titled, “At Day’s Close: Night In Times Past,” focusing on how people slept before the Industrial Age. In his essay, Ekirch suggests that:

“Until the modern age, most households had two distinct intervals of slumber, known as ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleep, bridged by an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. Usually, people would retire between 9 and 10 o’clock only to stir past midnight to smoke a pipe, brew a tub of ale or even converse with a neighbor.”

The notion that people in times past experienced segmented sleep patterns is surprising to me. Most of us have come to expect uninterrupted sleep, most of not all nights of the week. Needless to say, if we aren’t sleeping enough, we don’t like it very much.

This notion of first and second sleep is interesting. I’d love to try it. However, according to Ekirch, I’d have a hard time doing so. He suggests that modern lighting has an adverse impact on sleep. He notes that Harvard chronobiologist Charles A Czeisler has “likened lighting to a drug in its physiological effects, producing among other changes, altered levels of melatonin, the brain hormone that helps to regulate our circadian clock.” In short, this means that modern lighting disturbs our ability to sleep soundly and peacefully.

So, is Ekirch correct? Are we over-medicating ourselves in the pursuit of an uninterrupted night’s sleep? I don’t suffer from insomnia, but I know people who do. I don’t know if they would agree with Ekirch about the benefits of segmented sleep. They simply want to get some rest. Given this, they view sleep aids like Ambien and Lunesta as life-savers.

On another note, there’s a benefit of segmented sleep that I was very surprised to learn about. According to Ekirch some people in between first and second sleep:

“[R]emained in bed to pray or make love. This time after the first sleep was praised as uniquely suited for sexual intimacy; rested couples have ‘more enjoyment’ and ‘do it better,’ as one 16-th century French doctor wrote.”

If segmented sleep once again became the norm, could it give the “little blue pill” some competition? Who knows? Maybe some sleep researcher should develop a study testing this hypothesis. I’d love to see the results.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2006 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Beyond Category, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.