Pacing Hallways
We are, of course, unreliable witnesses to
our own sleep – and there’s even a study
(published in the journal Epidemiology)
to prove it. It seems we overestimate how
much sleep we’ve had by 48 minutes – a
significant margin in a game where every
second counts. Sleep monitors (featured on
your Apple Watch, Fitbit, Jawbone et al) may
ironically be part of the problem. “The most
common cause of sleep trouble is an inability
to dial down mental activity in the evening,”
says Dr Simon Kyle, a sleep and circadian
neuroscience expert. As smartphone
screens become increasingly present in
our bedrooms, the “blue light” they emit
interferes with the body’s production of sleep
hormone melatonin, meaning that when it
comes to drifting off, that extra 50 minutes of
Game of Thrones could set you back hours.
To test the impact of our lifestyles on sleep
patterns, researchers publishing in Current
Biology monitored hunter-gatherer tribes
in Africa and Bolivia to see if their back-to-
basics habits put them at an advantage. The
hypothesis was that the tribes would go
to sleep as night fell and wake at dawn. In
fact, they stayed up for a good three hours
after sunset – minus the Netflix binge. Lead
researcher Jerome Siegel posits that the
tribes’ sleeping patterns are linked to natural
circadian rhythms. “Universally they went to
sleep as the temperature dropped, and woke
when it reached a minimum, just before
sunrise. In many ways, this makes them
healthier than people in Western society.”
Reconfiguring our own circadian rhythms,
then, might be a challenge.
Despite best efforts, the current crop of
sleep devices struggle to account for the
subtleties of the various phases and waves
of sleep. There are five stages altogether,NIGHT CAPS
A pre-bed session at the pub can slash your
number of essential REM cycles from an optimum
seven to just two, distilling your exhaustion‘‘ It’s easy to develop a dependence on medication’’