Why Do Humans Sleep

Getting enough sleep is a crucial part of your overall health and well-being. It can help you regulate your weight, keeps stress in check, sharpens both your memory and mind, and can improve your mood.

No question about it — sleep is good for you, and most experts recommend you get at least eight uninterrupted hours per night.

Weirdly enough though, the way we sleep has changed drastically in the past two hundred years. 

In fact, our ancestors didn’t sleep through the night at all. Some scholars think they instead slept in two distinct shifts. Science of Us points to historian Roger Ekirch who says that patterns from people in early modern Europe and North America that show that humans slept in a “dead” and “morning” shift. This pattern is consistent with communities from many other cultures, including Brazil, Nigeria, and parts of Central America, leading Ekirch to believe that this might have been a universal model of sleep.

What changed? As with everything, it was technology.  Read More