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[Rogerdodger]

Can't Sleep? Read this.
http://www.bbc.co.uk...gazine-16964783

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night.
A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "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.