If you fall asleep during the day, don't worry, it's natural

If you ever felt guilty for feeling sleepy in the middle of the day, feel no longer like that.

New studies have found that sleeping 8 hours is abnormal!!!!

It happens to all of us, you wake up in the middle of the night and try desperately to get back to sleep but instead toss and turn until the alarm goes off. Rather than it being simply symptomatic of a stressful work week, science suggests you might be experiencing a throwback to a default pattern of human slumber. According to mounting research, the concept of a solid eight hours sleep is a fairly recent phenomenon and it's likely that our ancestors enjoyed "two sleeps" of shorter duration, separated by time awake, as opposed to one sustained period.

 And it seems like it has not only being an abnormal practice, but a relatively new invention:

Roger Ekirch, a professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech and author of At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, has found a wealth of evidence to suggest that the single sleep is a modern occurrence, with "first" and "second" sleeps considered the norm since the beginning of human civilisation.

To back this up, this is seen that in history, we have not follow a set pattern of sleeping, not even in the Bible!!!

Though it's an alien concept to us today, references to two sleeps can be found as far back as the Old Testament and Homer's Odyssey, and, more recently, in Don Quixote and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. The period between the two wasn't always a solitary affair, with people gathering to talk, have sex or visit the neighbours. But, the introduction of affordable light sources – from candlelight to public oil lamps – blurred the distinction between daytime and night-time activities and sleep patterns soon followed.

And blame it on the French for introducing late night partying:

It was the Parisian nobles and courtiers of the 1630s and 1640s who were the first to popularise the concept of expanding one's activities into the night as a sign of wealth, prestige and exclusivity – beginning the modern pattern of compressed sleep with one block of rest from about midnight until about 8am.

So, if you wake up in the middle of the night, don't feel guilty, accept it, and make a note to sleep, if you can, at least 1 or 2 hours after work, before going to sleep for good. I've been trying this lately, and has worked. Now, I don't have to feel guilty about it!!

If only I could convince my wife and kids about it!!