Interrupted Sleep Might Be the Best Kind

When I backpack I rarely sleep uninterrupted. Around 2-3am I'll wake partially and then sleep lightly from then on. I feel fine the next day.

I wonder if the outdoors experience in our ancestral past is the source of the two-sleep periods TFA mentions.

After all, somebody had to get up and feed the fire, and maybe re-heat another chunk of the prior-day's catch for a snack, take a pee in the bushes, throw rocks at the Hyaenas, and before you know it the whole camp is awake. Military traditions from the first organized armies carried this forward with the changing of the guard, more peeing in more bushes, fire tending, debauching the POWs, and checking the horses. Flock tending, crop guarding, bush watering, and debauchery over the ages tend to train our brain to this two-sleep pattern.

The history and quality of beds over the ages suggests some of this waking up and walking around was just to shake off a few bugs that were feasting, or re-arrange the straw for more comfort.

Now as for backpacking, sleeping on the hard ground after a day schlepping a pack up hill and over dale might just cause a lot of sore muscles and compressed flesh due to that rock underneath the foam pad. Not big enough to get up and move it, but just big enough to keep you awake. And that bladder which, while filling, has not yet reached emergency stage yet also keeps the bushes coming to mind.

You could get up, water the bushes, move the rock, and take a ibuprofen, but then you would sleep so soundly that you would be eaten by wolves before you awoke again.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/ngRl8GF7VNY/interrupted-sleep-might-be-the-best-kind

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