Why Sometimes Waking up in the Middle of the Night Shouldn’t be Considered a Bad Thing

It may surprise you to find out just how many of the quirks you usually experience throughout a night actually have an official name. Take for instance all of the days that you fall asleep only to wake up for a while before falling right back to sleep again. Believe or not, this is actually a phenomenon that has been studied and it’s called segmented sleep. The reason why is because a person’s sleep pattern is usually broken up into more than one part.

Also known as interrupted sleep or divided sleep, segmented sleep has actually been around for a long time. Back in medieval days, people used to practice segmented sleep all the time. It was only with the invention of electricity that human beings got out of the habit of segmented sleep. Electric lighting changed thing to the point where the process of segmented sleep actually started to seem strange to some, which is backwards since segmented sleep is actually more healthy and natural for the body than one long uninterrupted haul of unconsciousness.

In the past, the time of non-wakefulness that so differentiated that segmented sleep was taken advantage of in a number of ways. Consciousness was more often than not a shaky state of being when it came to segmented sleep patterns, but many people were so used to it that they had learned to use the time of wakefulness wisely. Farmers would take care of their crops, wives would clean, people would learn, build, bond, and even meditate during the periods of time that they were awake during a night. There were some who learned that the recording of dreams was also easier during this time as the dreams were usually more vivid to the dreamer than they would have been had he or she waited a whole night before writing down what they remember.

The circadian rhythm is what regulates a sleep cycle. It’s what makes you sleep during the night and rest during the day. With segmented sleep, a person has usually managed to interpose a short nap during the day, at which point their perceptions are able to become sharper at night when they fall into deeper stages of sleep. A keener consciousness of what’s going on around us and within our dreams is usually what promotes a dreamer to wake back up again, at which point they can process what they experienced at their leisure before falling back into peaceful oblivion.

Back in the day, the times during which a person spent awake during the night were considered priceless since they were also used as times of peace and quiet. Now, the modern man wants nothing more than a full night of uninterrupted sleep.

But what has a full night’s sleep really gained us? Not only are we bad tempered, a bit overweight, and largely insomniatic as a group, but there are also a number of individual problems that affect many of us, problems that could most likely be taken care by going through a segmented sleep pattern. When you consider that these sleep cycles are often interspersed with feelings of quiet wakefulness in the morning and after early afternoon naps, it’s a wonder that more people aren’t actually hoping for a night of interrupted sleep, instead of the other way around.