Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America’s Insomnia?

Anthropological studies of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers have also dispelled a popular myth about how humans should sleep.III Around the close of the early modern era (circa late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), historical texts suggest that Western Europeans would take two long bouts of sleep at night, separated by several hours of w

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In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public ... See more