The reason you wake up in the middle of the night isn’t insomnia (and how to fix it)

Getting enough sleep and in the meantime have a healthy and uninterrupted sleep is extremely important for the overall health and the brain. In fact, many people don’t pay too much attention to the importance of enough sleep which is crucial for the rejuvenating the brain. There are many people that have problems staying asleep during the night, and in most cases they think it is caused by sleeping disorder.

Even though this might be a reason, according to many different historical records we are looking much differently at sleeping.

Sleep segmented, the more normal than you realize

If you are one of those people that wake up during their good night sleep, it is most probably that you are suffering from apnea or insomnia. Segmented sleep actually means irregular sleep pattern which can be nothing but a biological response.

According to Roger Ekrich, and English scholar, our ancestors have been practicing segmented sleep because in the middle of the night they were meditating, pray, or doing chores at home. He has managed to find evidence of ‘first and second sleep’ in many different ancient documents and letters.

Most of the evidence he found refer that the hours between the first and the second sleep have been used for prayers. This time has been found to be the most relaxing period for people. The main reason according to Roger is because this was the time at midnight when the brain is producing relaxing hormone, prolactin.

There are many different studies which suggest that the sleeping problems might be caused by the natural preference of the body for segmented sleep.
This thesis Ekirch is defending from the fact that people in ancient times have been using segmented sleep. He believe that due to this historical sleeping pattern many people are suffering from segmented sleep, today known as ‘sleep maintenance insomnia’.

Greg Jacobs, a psychologist claims: “For most of evolution, we slept a certain way. Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleep and is likely to seep into waking life too.”

Also Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford:
“Many people wake up at night and panic. I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern. But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centers where sleep is studied.”

If you are one of those people that prefer to use sleeping pill in order to maintain their sleep throughout the night you should consider that the natural biorhythm is controlled by the light and darkness. In the past, people have been scheduling their day with the rising and setting of the sun. This is important because if you are using sleeping pill you might interfere with the natural biorhythm of the body.

source http://besthealthyguide.com