【摘要】：威廉希尔app 整理了睡眠对于人们来说很重要，那么睡眠满8小时是谬论?请看下面具体内容。
Typically, mention of our ever increasing sleeplessness is followed by calls for earlier bedtimes and a longer night’s sleep. But this directive may be part of the problem. Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives that we spend in bed.
一般来说，提到越来越多的睡眠不足问题，就不得不提“晚上早睡，多睡”这一倡导。然而，这个倡导也许正是问题部分症结所在。因为这个倡导不能帮助我们获得更多的休息，“8小时连续睡眠”武断地把睡眠的概念以及如何实现好睡眠框在一个很窄的观念框里。有些时候的辗转反侧也许就是来自我们对睡眠和身体需要的错误认识。事实是，无论是我们的身体还是大脑都不是专门为那耗在床上的1/3人生时间设计的。
The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.
人们应该在晚上连续睡8个小时的观念是最近被提起的。世界各地人口以各种各样的、令人惊奇的方式睡觉。例如，上百万的中国工人仍会在午饭后趴在桌子上睡上个把小时，白天小睡在印度和西班牙等地区也很普遍。
One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep。” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.
弗吉尼亚理工学院历史学教授罗格·艾瑞克在20世纪90年代早期就首先证实连续睡眠8小时是不可信的。他花费数小时研究夜的历史并且开始注意到关于睡眠的奇怪文献。《坎特伯雷故事集》中的一个人物决定在“第一段睡眠”后继续睡觉。英格兰的一位医生写到，在“第一段睡眠”和“第二段睡眠”之间的时间是学习和沉思的最好时间。一位16世纪的法国内科医生总结到，工人能够生出更多的孩子是因为他们等到“第一段睡眠”后才做爱。Ekirch教授很快发现到他并不是唯一一个认识到睡眠周期交替这一历史性存在的人。一位名叫Thomas A. Wehr的精神病专家在位于马里兰州贝塞斯达的国家心理卫生研究所工作，他做了个实验，实验中处在没有人工照明环境中。没有照明，没有电灯泡、电视或者电脑的干扰，被试者最初在晚上睡觉，但是，Wehr博士注意到被试者在午夜后不久醒来，数个小时候再度入睡。这与艾瑞克教授在历史文献和早期文学作品中发现的阶段性睡眠模式相同。
It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.
如果我们有机会远离现代生活，貌似我们的身体将会很自然地适应分段睡眠模式。被试者渐渐喜欢以一种新的方式经历黑夜。一旦他们抛弃“睡眠模式应该怎样怎样”的念头，他们会渴望午夜时间的到来，届时他们有深思的机会，无论是自我反省，还是给自己的一天一个跳跃式的启动，或者是想情爱的事。然而，我们大部分人并不认为午夜醒来时正常运作的信号。
Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has called “the ironic processes of mental control”.
医生们兜售帮助睡眠药物，并且提倡更多的睡眠，这些行为无意中强化了这样的观念：睡眠中断是有问题的或者状态不好的。我们认为自己在夜里应该获得一个好的休息，而如果我们在夜间醒来，我们就认为自己是不正常的，这样，睡眠焦虑的出现就不足为奇了。一系列的焦虑使我们失眠，一些人甚至要求助于药物或者睡眠帮助，这是个被哈佛心理学家称之为“具有讽刺意味的精神控制过程”的恶性循环。