Why do we humans strive to get eight hours of sleep a night? I never really questioned it when my parents held it as the golden standard. It’s something I.
But why do we humans strive to get eight hours of sleep a night? I never really questioned it when my parents held it as the golden standard. It’s something I took as a fact of life. But did humans always sleep that way?
Turns out, we didn’t. Our obsession with getting seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep is a fairly recent development.
“Our sleep today is less than two centuries old. It s a construct of modernity. It s artificial,” said Roger Ekirch, a historian and professor at Virginia Tech.
Ekirch made waves in 2005 when he published a book about nocturnal life in pre-Industrial western societies, “At Day’s Close.” His research revealed that up until the 19