A personal anecdote I’d like to share which relates to the recent polyphasic sleep post ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip6/polyphasic_sleep_seed_study_reprise/ ):
My 7 year old son who always tended to sleep long and late seems to have developed segmented sleep by himself in the last two weeks.
He claims to wake e.g. at 3:10 AM gets dressed, butters his school bread—and gets to bed again—in our family bed. It’s no joke. He lies dressed in bed and his satchel is packed.
And the interesting thing is: He is more alert and less bad tempered than before. He doesn’t do afternoon naps though—at least none that I know of.
What can have caused this? Maybe the seed was that our children were always allowed to come into the family bed in the night (but only in the night) which they did often.
I remember reading somewhere (sorry, no link) that waking up at the midnight, and then going to sleep again after an hour or so, was considered normal a few hundred years ago. Now this habit is gone, probably because we make the night shorter using artificial lights.
Yes. I know. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
I knew that beforehand. That was the reason I wasn’t worried when my children woke up at night and crawled into our family bed (some other parents seem to worry.about the quality of their childrens sleep).
But I’m surprised that he actually segmented and that it went this far. I understood that artificial lighting—and we have enough of that—suppresses this segmentation.
I understood that artificial lighting—and we have enough of that—suppresses this segmentation.
Perhaps it is not the light per se, but the fact that when you stay awake at evening, and wake up on alarm clock in the morning, the body learns to give up the segmented sleep to protect itself from the sleep deprivation. Maybe the time interval for your children between going to sleep and having to wake up is large enough.
Possibly. But he has been a late riser always and he doesn’t really go to sleep earler than before. In fact he get earler than before. But maybe his sleep pattern just changes due to normal development.
My older son (9 years) also sometimes gets up in the night to visit the family bed. But I guess he is not awake long. He likes to build things and read or watch movies (from our file server) until quite late in the evening (often 10 PM). We allow that because he has no trouble getting up early.
A personal anecdote I’d like to share which relates to the recent polyphasic sleep post ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip6/polyphasic_sleep_seed_study_reprise/ ): My 7 year old son who always tended to sleep long and late seems to have developed segmented sleep by himself in the last two weeks. He claims to wake e.g. at 3:10 AM gets dressed, butters his school bread—and gets to bed again—in our family bed. It’s no joke. He lies dressed in bed and his satchel is packed. And the interesting thing is: He is more alert and less bad tempered than before. He doesn’t do afternoon naps though—at least none that I know of.
What can have caused this? Maybe the seed was that our children were always allowed to come into the family bed in the night (but only in the night) which they did often.
I remember reading somewhere (sorry, no link) that waking up at the midnight, and then going to sleep again after an hour or so, was considered normal a few hundred years ago. Now this habit is gone, probably because we make the night shorter using artificial lights.
Yes. I know. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep I knew that beforehand. That was the reason I wasn’t worried when my children woke up at night and crawled into our family bed (some other parents seem to worry.about the quality of their childrens sleep).
But I’m surprised that he actually segmented and that it went this far. I understood that artificial lighting—and we have enough of that—suppresses this segmentation.
Perhaps it is not the light per se, but the fact that when you stay awake at evening, and wake up on alarm clock in the morning, the body learns to give up the segmented sleep to protect itself from the sleep deprivation. Maybe the time interval for your children between going to sleep and having to wake up is large enough.
Possibly. But he has been a late riser always and he doesn’t really go to sleep earler than before. In fact he get earler than before. But maybe his sleep pattern just changes due to normal development.
My older son (9 years) also sometimes gets up in the night to visit the family bed. But I guess he is not awake long. He likes to build things and read or watch movies (from our file server) until quite late in the evening (often 10 PM). We allow that because he has no trouble getting up early.