alt Hacker NewsAccording to the article:
"It's not that modern parents are waking up more often. Work by Samson and others has found that people in hunter-gatherer societies usually wake more frequently through the night than we do."
But I think there's a difference between waking up at night because your baby is crying, calming them down, going back to sleep, etc etc. when you have a 9-to-5 job, versus if you're a hunter-gatherer.
Replies
MarkSweep • yesterday at 10:41 PM
To put a name to it, “biphasic sleep” used to be more common:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
lumost • yesterday at 10:45 PM
The 9-5 is doing a major part of that comment. Irregular sleep isn’t the end of the world if you can sleep in and recover. Modern parents don’t get a chance to recover.
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I spend a lot of time in the rural Philippines and I notice that locals out here don't sleep that well and it doesn't seem to bother them. They get up extremely early with the sun, roosters are crowing even before that, cats are fighting randomly through the night, storms kick up many nights in the area through the year, and then they sometimes stay up late singing karaoke, though most of the time they are in bed early.
In compensation I noticed they nap frequently in the day time, often in the hottest part of the day when it's unpleasant to work.
It put my own sleep issues in perspective, I realized I had been a little too precious about it and I can indeed do fine on more fractured sleep. Often I form a judgment in the morning about my sleep and if I feel bad about it, I carry that through the day. I'm more convinced now it's a psychosomatic thing, I'm convincing myself I should be tired! So I try not to do that now and think of the people out here who live every day like this.