睡眠需滿八小時是謬論?大綱
SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it’s the chime of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day in your head. Next thing you know, you’re out of bed and engaged with the world, once again ignoring the often quoted fact that eight straight hours of sleep is essential.
在伸手不見五指的靜謐午夜，有時會發生一些小插曲：或許是一個短信到來的聲音，或許是iPhone手機提醒您收到新郵件的屏幕閃動，又或許是發現自己在盯着天花板，腦海中如放映電影般回顧一天的事情。如你所知，接下來你會不顧“連續8小時睡眠是必不可少的”這一常常被提起的告誡，起牀，回到現實世界。Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States — nearly a third of all working adults — get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.
聽起來很熟悉吧？並非只有你是這樣。美國疾病控制和預防中心的最新報告顯示，在美國大概有4100萬人口(接近總工作人口的1/3)每晚睡6小時，或者更短，這部分要歸罪於科技，如它帶來的短信聲、屏幕閃動等。睡眠不足困擾着經濟領域中的各行各業的人。 大概42%的礦工反映睡眠不足，而又27%的金融保險從業者也抱怨缺覺。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.
一般來說，提到越來越多的睡眠不足問題，就不得不提“晚上早睡，多睡”這一倡導。然而，這個倡導也許正是問題部分癥結所在。因爲這個倡導不能幫助我們獲得更多的休息，“8小時連續睡眠”武斷地把睡眠的概念以及如何實現好睡眠框在一個很窄的觀念框裏。有些時候的輾轉反側也許就是來自我們對睡眠和身體需要的錯誤認識。事實是，無論是我們的身體還是大腦都不是專門爲那耗在牀上的1/3人生時間設計的。
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.
人們應該在晚上連續睡8個小時的觀念是最近被提起的。世界各地人口以各種各樣的、令人驚奇的方式睡覺。例如，上百萬的中國工人仍會在午飯後趴在桌子上睡上個把小時，白天小睡在印度和西班牙等地區也很普遍。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.
弗吉尼亞理工學院歷史學教授羅格·艾瑞克在20世紀90年代早期就首先證實連續睡眠8小時是不可信的。他花費數小時研究夜的歷史並且開始注意到關於睡眠的奇怪文獻。《坎特伯雷故事集》中的一個人物決定在“第一段睡眠”後繼續睡覺。英格蘭的一位醫生寫到，在“第一段睡眠”和“第二段睡眠”之間的時間是學習和沉思的最好時間。一位16世紀的法國內科醫生總結到，工人能夠生出更多的孩子是因爲他們等到“第一段睡眠”後才做愛。Ekirch教授很快發現到他並不是唯一一個認識到睡眠週期交替這一歷史性存在的人。一位名叫Thomas A. Wehr的精神病專家在位於馬里蘭州貝塞斯達的國家心理衛生研究所工作，他做了個實驗，實驗中處在沒有人工照明環境中。沒有照明，沒有電燈泡、電視或者電腦的干擾，被試者最初在晚上睡覺，但是，Wehr博士注意到被試者在午夜後不久醒來，數個小時候再度入睡。這與艾瑞克教授在歷史文獻和早期文學作品中發現的階段性睡眠模式相同。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.
如果我們有機會遠離現代生活，貌似我們的身體將會很自然地適應分段睡眠模式。被試者漸漸喜歡以一種新的方式經歷黑夜。一旦他們拋棄“睡眠模式應該怎樣怎樣”的念頭，他們會渴望午夜時間的到來，屆時他們有深思的機會，無論是自我反省，還是給自己的一天一個跳躍式的啓動，或者是想情愛的事。然而，我們大部分人並不認爲午夜醒來時正常運作的信號。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”.
醫生們兜售幫助睡眠藥物，並且提倡更多的睡眠，這些行爲無意中強化了這樣的觀念：睡眠中斷是有問題的或者狀態不好的。我們認爲自己在夜裏應該獲得一個好的休息，而如果我們在夜間醒來，我們就認爲自己是不正常的，這樣，睡眠焦慮的出現就不足爲奇了。一系列的焦慮使我們失眠，一些人甚至要求助於藥物或者睡眠幫助，這是個被哈佛心理學家稱之爲“具有諷刺意味的精神控制過程”的惡性循環。
