The pursuit for 8 hours of sleep could be keeping us up at night
We’re constantly told 8 hours is the optimal amount of sleep for health and energy, but if you don’t or can’t get it you might be left feeling stressed and even concerned for your health.
However, a leading sleep expert wants us all to know the furphy we've been made to believe about a perfect eight-hour block of sleep.
Dr David Cunnington, specialist sleep physician, says that the idea of eight hours of sleep was invented by humans and isn't necessarily the way Mother Nature has programmed us.
"This concept of eight hours' sleep is a concept of industrialisation, it's a social construct," he said.
In fact, Dr Cunnington says that a lot of our sleep ideas stem from the slogan coined in 1817 by labour rights activist Robert Owen: "Eight hours labour, eight hours' recreation, eight hours' rest."
"Up until the early 19th century … human sleep had been three to four hours at the start of the night, an hour or two awake in the night, and then some dozing until the sun came up, and a nap in the day if the opportunity arose," Dr Cunnington explains.
"That’s more biologically how we sleep, that flexibility of sleep and wake being a bit dispersed across the day."
But when industrialisation occurred, we began "shoehorning" sleep into a designated window. Dr Cunnington says that can work perfectly fine when life is going smoothly, but can pave the way for anxiety if you have sleeping difficulties or a lot of life stress.
"[We have] rigid time domain constraints around sleep and wakefulness — sleep must only occur in this eight-hour window," he says.
"[We think we must] get eight hours in the eight hours we allocate for it, and then wakefulness must occur for 16 hours continuously with no sleep interrupting that continuous wakefulness, and performance across that wakeful period must be uniform.
"That’s a societal construct … it’s just not biological. We have ebbs and flows in energy across the day, but that allocation of time, that eight-eight-eight doesn’t pay any respect to that."
While our society is unlikely to change to allow us to sleep in chunks, Dr Cunnington says the knowledge that sleep wasn't always forced into a particular block and did not always have so much pressure on it, is useful to know.
Image: Getty